Bragança and Zamora as World Heritage?

The project “Bragança and Zamora as World Heritage?” is being developed by CEPESE, under the supervision of Luís Alexandre Rodrigues and Fernando de Sousa, with the support of the City Hall of Bragança and the Ayuntamiento of Zamora, and it aims at carrying out a study that analyses the feasibility and success possibilities of a joint application process for the registration of both those cities or the cross-border region where they are located in the UNESCO World Heritage List.

The limitation of the borders between Spain and Portugal contributed to describe some of the most relevant facts in its history. Has it, in fact, existed from the historic-cultural point of view, between Zamora and Bragança? Probably not. Was it a supra-border reality, a way of settlement/ relationship between peoples, who felt they belonged to the same territory, to the same region regardless of the fact that it was divided between two States, due to the vicissitudes of the Reconquest? Were there peoples that despite being limited by a border never felt separated by it? That built in the same way, kept the same common uses, and traditions, and that throughout history moved between two countries, ignoring the border. A paradigmatic example of these relationships is the first Portuguese King, D. Afonso Henriques, who was knighted in Zamora, a fact that originated, quite recently, the creation of a Spanish-Portuguese Institution, the Rei Afonso Henriques Foundation, with headquarters in Zamora and Bragança.

Besides the architectural and monumental heritage, it is also important to study the possibility of standing before intangible heritage capable of being classified by UNESCO, which will for sure be one of the challenges to explore in the feasibility study.

Coordinators - Luís Alexandre Rodrigues and Fernando de Sousa