Vernacular Cartographies of Riverine Risk: Navigation, Memory and Landscape Legibility in the Historical Pontos of the Douro River, Portugal

This article examines the historical Pontos (literally, ‘points’) of the Portuguese Douro River as evidence of how a transformed fluvial landscape was previously known, navigated and remembered. The study draws on ninety named river locations recorded by Pinho Leal in Portugal Antigo e Moderno, read alongside Forrester's account of navigation and later regional writing. It distinguishes the complete inventory from twelve entries with explicit descriptions and from selected cases supported by additional historical evidence. Documentary analysis, controlled semantic interpretation and partial historical geolocation show how named places connected changing water levels, channel conditions, navigational difficulty and accumulated experience. These relationships support a bounded concept of vernacular river literacy: the ability to recognise and communicate environmental differences relevant to movement, thereby giving the Pontos a cartographic significance without establishing a complete or uniformly shared map. Hydraulic regulation has transformed both river conditions and the practical contexts in which such knowledge mattered, but later writing and photographs illuminate the uneven persistence of an earlier working landscape. The article argues that surviving names and representations preserve traces of situated river knowledge, while their cultural persistence should not be equated with uninterrupted transmission of navigational practice.