Loures Park

South of Loures, some 19 hectares of hillside with wide views over the city give way to a landmark urban park. The proposal starts from an integrated reading of the territory, bringing together landscape, heritage and environment, and extends Parque Adão Barata as the second phase of the green belt that surrounds the city, giving substance to its urban ecological structure.

Three programmes with independent phasing are organised on this base. More than 70% of the land is given over to green space, in a park that gathers differentiated experiences: a natural amphitheatre, paths and viewpoints, a teaching farm, dry meadows and recreation areas. To the east, a business park of metropolitan scale (Loures Office Park) takes advantage of the new accessibility and the future light rail station. To the west and south, a new residential quarter (Loures Sustainable Urban Living) proposes housing typologies in a park setting, with environmental and energy certification.

Water structures the experience of the place. The project restores the Mealhada stream and its riparian gallery and rehabilitates the traditional structures for capturing, conveying and storing water (galleries, channels and tanks), among them those of the eighteenth-century Quinta do Peixeiro. Reflecting pools and channels run through the park as a memory of the flood irrigation once practised on the floodplain, linking the urban area to the river in a gesture that evokes the drawing of a river basin.

Because it lies within one of the country’s identified critical flood zones, the intervention takes flood-risk mitigation as a design premise: retention basins and preferential flooding areas upstream, renaturalisation of the banks and torrent control, freeing the riverside areas of obsolete buildings and returning them to public use.

Mobility was rethought throughout: the reprofiling of the EN8 as a qualified entrance road into the city, a stretch of the Loures-Odivelas intermunicipal cycle link, a continuous and accessible pedestrian network with boardwalks over the water, and coordination with the alignment of the future metro line. The work brought together urban design, landscape architecture, hydraulics, mobility and heritage, coordinated on a BIM model that supported the articulation between disciplines and the phasing of the proposal.