The project AQUA-REVIVE has been officially launched as of November 1st, 2025! The 2.5 year project is a collaboration between Instituto Superior Técnico and the Associação de Municípios da Região de Setúbal (AMRS) with the goal to decipher the ruins of the hydraulic systems of the Capuchos and São Paulo convents–today situated in the Quinta São Paulo in Alferrara. Water scarcity is a growing concern in the context of climate change and given that past water and land-use practices allowed communities to survive sustainably for centuries, we believe they must be part of our knowledge base going forward. Using a combination of digital survey techniques and historical research, we will propose a virtual reconstruction of these systems as a bridge to the site’s future heritage programming, reconnecting communities with this lost knowledge and supporting future development strategies in which water plays a central role.

In this blog, we present two key activities carried out in the summer of 2025 which provided an essential launching pad for our current work. Between the 23rd and 27th of June 2025, a georadar survey was conducted to decipher the missing links between the fragments of these historic water systems. This activity coincided with the 3rd Meeting of Conventual Houses of Arrábida on June 27th, an important networking event that will facilitate the project by broadening contacts and promoting knowledge exchange between different expertise.

Georadar Survey (June 23rd-27th 2025)

A week-long ground-penetrating radar (GPR) survey was carried out to investigate the underground features of the site and to locate hidden water channels. Although a comprehensive survey of the hydraulic systems was conducted by Telmo Pina in 1998, that earlier work necessarily relied heavily on inference and speculation for subsurface elements in cases where direct physical evidence was lacking. Georadar works by transmitting electromagnetic waves into the ground and recording their reflections, providing a better sense of what lies beneath the surface of the terrain at a depth of up to 10 meters, depending on the circumstance.

The initial findings which will be analysed further over the course of the next months, mapped very clear points of water distribution within the Convent of the Capuchos, giving us a clearer picture of how water moved through the various interior spaces of the convent as well as helping us to locate previously unknown paths of water in the terrain between the exterior spaces. This has also helped to eliminate the hypothesis that water passed into the cloister space, a common distribution path at that moment in history but which we find no evidence of today.

At the São Paulo convent, the results were less straightforward. Instead of clear lines of water distribution leading from the exterior to interior, we identified new structures beneath the surface of the cloister, which complicate our understanding of the site. Over the next several months, we plan to share this data with other experts for further interpretation. The results show very clear diagonal lines running across the cloister space suggesting either a more complex presence of water channels that initially thought, or a possible earlier phase of construction buried beneath the existing structure.

3rd Meeting of the Conventual Houses of Arrábida (June 27th 2025)

The Quinta de São Paulo hosted the 3rd Meeting of the Conventual Houses of Arrábida on 27 June 2025.

Our contribution to the event was the presentation of the exhbition “Pedagogies of Digital Heritage as a Nexus for Historical Research, Accessibility, and the Environment,”  which highlighted the results of three years of work with students at Instituto Superior Técnico, including coursework from the HBIM (Heritage Building Information Modelling) course and master’s theses related to the Arrábida convents.

The presentation of the exhibit was followed by presentations addressing the history, architecture, and life within the Arrábida convents. Presentations brought together specialists, researchers, institutions, and technicians from the various institutional and municipal entities responsible for convents belonging to the province.

In the afternoon, participants visited the Capuchin Convent of Alferrara together which was an opportunity to discuss the recent findings of the georadar survey and to further examine the architectural elements of unknown origin or function which have become obscured through the natural processes of time and weathering.

A closing discussion sheltered graciously by one of the convents aged olive trees gave participants the opportunity to reflect on paths for safeguarding the heritage of the Arrábida Province and to outline future editions of the annual Arrábida meetings. Importantly for Project AQUA-Revive, this conversation led to a shared commitment to sustain a space for knowledge sharing, research, debate in the coming years. As a result, representatives of the various houses of Arrábida now meet on a monthly basis, working together to consolidate and expand this emerging network of exchange.

Acknowledgements

The week-long georadar campaign, which also included SLAM (Simultaneous Localization and Mapping) scanning, was carried out by Global Geosystems with geographic engineers Andreia Sousa and António Santos from Leica Geosystems, who kindly demonstrated these digital tools to the event participants.

The event was sponsored and fully organized by AMRS, who prepared the venue, arranged catering, and supported the preparation of the site to conduct the georadar work.

This work was financially supported by JSPS KAKENHI (grant number 25K17761) carried out at Tokyo College, The University of Tokyo and by the European Union’s Horizon Europe research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No. 101207766. This research was also funded in part by the Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia, I.P. (FCT, https://ror.org/00snfqn58) under Grant UID/6438/2025 of the research unit CERIS.