From narratives of the sea to its representations: the Protected Areas of the Bay of Castelhanos - Ilhabela, North Coast of São Paulo State

• Grant number: 23/06244-0
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Master
• Start date: March 01, 2024
• End date: February 28, 2025
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - Geography - Human Geography
• Principal Investigator: Maria Tereza Duarte Paes
• Grantee: Fabio Luís de Campos
• Host Institution: Instituto de Geociências (IG). Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP). Campinas , SP, Brazil

Abstract

More than a visual product, the landscape is a cultural, material, and subjective production, socially constructed. The conductive element of this social construction in coastal areas is the sea, with countless ways of representing it as a lived and imagetic resource. From tourist, port, biodiversity, and development references, in the Castelhanos Bay in Ilhabela, a municipality on the North Coast of São Paulo, the sea stands out as a cultural reference of the caiçara way of life and as an object of environmental protection of Conservation Units (UCs). Both representations tension their forms of control and use of territory and landscape. Here, the demand of the caiçara population of the Bay for the consolidation of the Castelhanos Extractive Reserve (RESEX) to ensure the land tenure regularization and access to seascapes and maretórios, located in the Ilhabela State Park (PEIb) and the Area of Marine Environmental Protection Litoral Norte (APAMLN), stands out. With this objective, this research seeks to understand the uses and meanings of the seascapes attributed to the RESEX of Castelhanos by the caiçara populations of the Bay through the use of photographs and the representations regarding the PEIb and APAMLN as territories and landscapes of conservation, resorting to the narratives and images present in the documents of both UCs, to understand the meanings that these three UCs use to appropriate the Bay space and, also, how the narratives and forms of knowledge are structured to meet the socio-environmental protection of the sea in the UCs, with the final production of the iconography of the Bay's maritimities.