Mid-twentieth-century dam construction along the Douro River, where it makes the border of Portugal and Spain, gave rise to planned settlements constructed by the electrical company Hidroelétrica do Douro (HED) to accommodate the necessary workforce. However, non-specialized construction workers, who arrived by the hundreds during the 1950s, were not allotted housing by HED, nor were they granted access to complementary amenities such as community centres or schools. Instead, they independently constructed makeshift dwellings from leftover dam materials on nearby slopes, where they remained out of sight from the settlements. As the planned settlements, now largely abandoned, have grown to be considered seminal works of Portuguese modernist architecture and displayed in books, exhibitions and documentaries, construction workers and their spaces have remained hidden from this historiography. Our research focuses on Miranda do Douro, a small city in the Portuguese northeast, which experienced a fourfold population increase due to worker influx. We combine archival documentation with oral testimonies from diverse local residents, collected through semi-structured interviews and informal conversations. From these sources, we investigate the threefold manner in which architecture interacted with labour in the construction of Douro’s dams, beyond, but interconnected 107with, the process of production: 1. The design planned settlement reproduced and reinforced the hierarchical structures of the construction site. 2. The existence of a nearby urban centre added a layer of complexity to the social relations between the construction-site settlement and unplanned slums. This complexity is also furthered by the development of Miranda do Douro’s architectural structures for health and education. 3. Dominant architectural narratives tend to ignore these complexities and focus on the construction-site settlement as a reality detached from a broader process, namely that of its production, contributing to the erasure of labour in historical narratives, within and outside architecture.

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