Internal Colonisation, Land Reclamation and Young Offender Re-education in Late 19th-Century Portugal: The Vila Fernando Experiment

Abstract

Before intense wheat-growing campaigns, in the 1930s, transformed the landscape of Alentejo, in south Portugal, the region was largely seen as inhospitable, underpopulated and unproductive, unable to contribute to the country’s much-needed agrarian development. Concurrently, the State struggled to adequately institutionalise the underage delinquents, vagrants, criminals and outlawed youths that roamed the streets in Lisbon and Porto. Establishing an agricultural reform school in Vila Fernando, Portalegre, in 1881, was presented as a modern response to both concerns: a purpose-built structure that enabled the government to regenerate, re-socialise and moralise young offenders in a setting clearly removed from nefarious urban influences; and a concrete attempt at reclaiming large expanses of economically irrelevant land. Once re-educated, the former pupils of Vila Fernando and their families were to become leaseholders in the area and, thereby, agents in the dissemination of up-to-date techniques that would finally ‘civilise’ farming in the region – front-line troops in the battle to settle Alentejo, against its perennial desertification. In a country where notably few new structures were built to answer ‘modern’, 19th-century needs, with judicial and penal systems woefully underserved, Vila Fernando was an oddity. Explicitly combining European models (particularly, Mettray in France and Ruiselede in Belgium, in the re-education concept, and Italian experiences in land reclamation and colonisation), its ambitious proposition – architecturally and socially – was polemical, denigrated, underfunded and finally never completed. Framing Vila Fernando within domestic and international developments in penal policy, social rehabilitation and internal colonisation, my paper examines the territorial, para-urban and architectural project conceived for this ultra-peripheral outpost of modern European statecraft. The colony-school, outdated (and unfinished) when it opened in 1895, epitomised Portugal’s struggle to deploy the institutions characteristic of a developed nation, when its imperial ambitions were curtailed, industrialisation lagged and conservatism stifled culture and society. I will discuss the specificities of Vila Fernando’s remit and how institutionalising children and youth – not adults – in colonisation settlements potentiated the rhetorical capacity of these territories of incarceration to transform at once land, lives and societies.