Paper short abstract:

This paper examines the production of landscape representations of the Douro Wine Region. Crossing a diachronic research in moving and still image archives with an ethnographic approach to the contemporary practices of visuality that make promotional touristic images by unmanned aerial vehicles.

Paper long abstract:

This paper explores the following questions: What are the aesthetic, ideological and cultural parameters that guide the "makers" of audiovisual representations of the Douro landscape? In what way has the incorporation of new techniques and technologies of capturing representations of tourist landscapes established new approaches or departures from the tourist experience?

Trough an analysis of moving and still image archives of the region and by the ethnographic data collected from the practices of present day "makers" of promotional touristic representations, we will show how this professionals idealize and represent this landscape.

The first cartographic representation of the Alto Douro Vinhateiro region was made in 1843 by Joseph Forrester fixing the boundaries of the territory known for the produce of Port Wine. In 2001 this region was added to the World Heritage List as a cultural landscape. With the UNESCO inscription, this essentially winemaking region constituted by steep terraces is becoming also a touristic landscape. Its promotion demands images that are in the present time mediated by sophisticated representation technologies.

The starting point is the year of the publishing of Forrester's map. It is interesting to verify that this cartographic vision of the territory will be resumed in the XXI century, through the proliferation of the use of unmanned aerial vehicles, which has established a canon in the production of promotional videos, in which aerial moving image is favored as a form of representing the landscape.