The T.E.R.R.A-E project starts from the primary school in Extremo to understand the role of school spaces in rural communities and their long-term impact. It develops a participatory investigation that explores memories, experiences, and meanings associated with the school as a relational territory. Built by the Estado Novo regime, the school is understood as a device for social, educational, and territorial transformation, articulating local community dynamics with migratory processes. The project is structured in a recursive movement between the “School of the Territory” and the “Territory School”.

The project includes workshops with the local population to collect memories and reflect on the reactivation of the space in its relationship with the territory. The approach is interdisciplinary, articulating architecture, history, archaeology, and education. It is part of an action-research project and aims to develop a replicable model for heritage valorization and sustainable development in rural contexts, culminating in a conceptual model for the Extremo Territory School.

Image: The Landscape of the Extreme (2022)

Image: Extremo primary school in 2010. Archive image retrieved from Barbosa (2026)