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Between 1939 and the late 1960s, the Spanish Francoist regime carried out one of twentieth-century Europe's largest state-led rural territorial transformations through its Instituto Nacional de Colonización (National Institute of Colonisation, INC): entire villages were designed, built and populated according to a centrally conceived plan that redistributed land, relocated families and imposed new agricultural and settlement models. This paper examines one such case, Veiga do Pumar (Castro de Rei, Lugo, Galicia), the only colonisation village in Galicia built exclusively to resettle families forcibly displaced by a hydroelectric reservoir. Between 1968 and 1970, twelve families from Negueira de Muñiz, uprooted from a mountain economy of communal grazing and subsistence agriculture, were moved into a flat, dispersed, technified landscape designed by state engineers with no involvement of its future inhabitants, and subjected throughout to the disciplinary oversight of the regime's colonisation staff.
The paper asks how the women who inhabited this planned landscape experienced, absorbed and reshaped the uncertainty it produced in their everyday lives, and what a gendered, ethnographically grounded perspective can add to planning history's understanding of whose knowledge and agency are recognised in authoritarian, high-modernist territorial projects. While the INC's technical planning apparatus, its engineers, its land redistribution schemes, its model villages, has received substantial historiographical attention, the everyday labour through which resettled women translated an abstract plan into a liveable, workable place has remained largely undocumented, both in the original colonisation records and in the subsequent academic literature, which has tended to foreground male-coded categories such as the "agricultural entrepreneur" that the regime's own propaganda promoted. This gap matters beyond the specific case: authoritarian planning schemes are usually reconstructed from the institutional record left by planners, which structurally underrepresents the improvised, gendered and often unrecorded work through which a designed territory is actually made habitable. Recovering that work offers a different vantage point on how uncertainty generated by a plan is absorbed, unevenly, by those who did not design it, and on how planning legitimacy is contested and remade at the scale of the household and the daily task rather than only through organised, visible resistance (Cabana Iglesia & Hernández Burgos, 2024).
The paper draws on Henri Lefebvre's (1991) triad of spatial practice, representations of space and representational space, commonly summarised as perceived, conceived and lived space, to read the colonisation plan as a conceived space imposed from outside, and the daily reworking of housing, water access, livestock work and leisure by resettled women as a form of lived space that persistently exceeded and reworked the technicians' design. This is put into dialogue with James C. Scott's (1998) account of high modernism, which frames authoritarian development schemes as projects that systematically discount local, practical knowledge in favour of standardised, legible designs; the paper argues that attending to gendered everyday practice recovers exactly the kind of situated knowledge that high-modernist planning is structurally disposed to ignore, and that gender operated as an additional, largely unexamined axis along which that knowledge was distributed and discounted. Tim Ingold's (1993) processual understanding of landscape as an ongoing record of dwelling further supports treating the transformation of Veiga do Pumar's terrain, soil regarded as unproductive by both settlers and INC technicians, and rendered fertile only through decades of sustained manual labour, as itself a form of spatial production, continuously appropriated, reworked and contested by those who inhabit it, rather than a passive backdrop to planning decisions (Bender, 1993).
The paper is based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Veiga do Pumar between February and June 2025. Fieldwork consisted primarily of participation in the monthly meetings of As da outra ourela, an association founded in 2023 by the women of the colonisation villages of Terra Chá to recover and transmit their oral memory. These meetings, attended by an average of eighteen women, provided the setting for semi-structured interviews, informal conversations and photo-elicitation using participants' own domestic photographic archives, which allowed practices and spatial arrangements that no longer exist, such as the pre-resettlement journey to fetch water, to be reconstructed visually as well as verbally. Interviews were deliberately left open to depart from a semi-structured script whenever participants steered the conversation elsewhere, on the understanding that such departures were themselves ethnographically informative about which aspects of the resettlement mattered most to those who lived through it.
Findings are organised around two complementary movements. First, the new planned landscape reconfigured women's everyday practices and knowledge. Communal tasks inherited from the villages of origin, harvesting and ensiling hay, learning to operate new machinery such as tractors and rotary mowers, initially sustained forms of neighbourly cooperation across the new, dispersed plot layout. Notably, the state's own vocational training programmes for the new machinery were designed exclusively for men, so that women learned to operate the same equipment they used daily through informal, unrecorded practice rather than through any institutional channel, a small but telling instance of how the plan's own knowledge infrastructure reproduced gendered exclusion. Other planned infrastructure had similarly ambivalent effects: running water and electricity, provided in every house for the first time, removed the daily, collectively undertaken journey to a shared spring that had previously structured much of women's sociability in the villages of origin. Meanwhile, the progressive intensification of dairy farming confined an increasing share of daily labour to the enclosed, family-based space of the cowshed, eroding the communal sociability that communal fieldwork had earlier sustained. Access to leisure spaces remained sharply gendered throughout: the village bar functioned mainly as a male social space, while women's outings were largely restricted to church attendance and provisioning, producing a documented double burden of agricultural and domestic labour that fell disproportionately on women. Second, and consistent with previous scholarship on how residents inhabited these villages (Cabana Iglesia, 2020), women and their families actively reworked the built environment that the INC had designed without their participation, exercising what Henry Raymond (1984) termed the practical competence of the inhabitant: houses were internally reconfigured, cowsheds redesigned once their original layout proved unworkable for daily feeding and milking, and unproductive soil was gradually rendered fertile through sustained manure application and repeated tilling over several decades, a material transformation the settlers themselves describe as never fully completed and, in their own account, still incomplete today.
The paper also examines how these experiences are remembered today. Consistent with what previous historiography has termed a self-affirming memory (Cabana Iglesia, 2011), women's present-day narratives foreground the economic success of dairy farming and largely omit the dispossession and disciplinary control that accompanied resettlement. Yet the same dairy specialisation that women credit with their families' prosperity is identified by the same women as the process that isolated households from one another and depleted the very communal ties that colonisation once relied on, a tension the interviewees themselves articulate without prompting. This paradox now intersects with a further, present-day layer of uncertainty: an ageing, shrinking population, the withdrawal of rural services such as the local doctor and the weekly mass, and climate-related losses to arable production are together placed by the women interviewed at the centre of an uncertain future for the village. It is a future to which As da outra ourela itself responds as a present-day, community-led form of collective action, actively turning Veiga do Pumar back into what Marc Augé (1995) called an anthropological place, and reconstructing communal ties and place-attachment (Nora, 1989) through regular gathering, memory work and mutual support, in a context where the village's other historic gathering points, its bar, its weekly mass, have themselves disappeared or been reduced.
This case contributes a historical, gendered and ethnographically grounded example to current debates on how planning decisions distribute the burden of managing uncertainty across different social groups, and on whose knowledge is recognised in the production and contestation of territorial plans. It suggests that everyday, incremental appropriation of an imposed spatial order, reworking a cowshed layout, converting an unproductive plot, redistributing domestic and agricultural labour, constitutes a form of planning agency that operates largely outside, and often invisibly to, the institutional processes that planning history and theory typically foreground. Recognising this register does not romanticise it: the same evidence shows agency exercised within, and constrained by, a strongly asymmetrical relation of power, and at a considerable and unevenly distributed cost to the women who bore it. Attending to this gendered, lived register of spatial production nonetheless offers a comparative resource for planning studies and heritage practice confronted with the depopulation and climate-driven uncertainty currently affecting many rural European territories: it points towards forms of collective, community-based memory and place-making work, of which As da outra ourela is one contemporary instance, as a resource for transformative rural planning practice, and not merely as an object of historical or heritage documentation.
References
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Bender, B. (Ed.). (1993). Landscape: Politics and perspectives. Berg.
Cabana Iglesia, A. (2011). Memoria colectiva y "Revolución verde". Más allá del cambio productivo y ecológico. In D. Lanero & D. Freire (Eds.), Agriculturas e innovación tecnológica en la Península Ibérica (1946-1975). Ministerio de Medio Ambiente y Medio Rural y Marino.
Cabana Iglesia, A. (2020). Sisar lugares en tramas forzadas: Habitar los pueblos de colonización en Galicia. In D. Lanero Táboas (Ed.), De la chabola al barrio social: Arquitecturas, políticas de vivienda y actitudes sociales en la Europa del Sur (1920-1980) (pp. 161–184). Comares.
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