Long Live PDG (Parque das Gerações) has become a rallying cry for the skaters of Cascais – a fishing town near Lisbon, Portugal – trying to save their vital local skatepark. The slogan began with a petition started by Pedro Coriel, who originally proposed its construction at a budget meeting in 2011 that allowed citizens to pitch ideas for potential funding: PDG would serve as a recreational space, but also a social intervention project that would be able to support young skaters from the poorer neighbourhoods in the area.
“We spent a summer building our shop with our bare hands, with the help of loads of our friends in the community,” says Bernard Aragão, who runs POP Skate Shop in the park with his twin brother Laurence. The brothers have been deeply involved in the project from the very beginning: after the ramps and skate-related concession stands came a cafeteria. “It just got more and more dynamic, and it’s never stopped growing,” he adds. By 2017, this exponential growth meant that the skatepark was sorely in need of an expansion – it also needed to be officially reclassified as a park. “It was meant to be done by December 2020,” says Bernard. Despite PDG winning another round of local funding with a record number of votes, “it never happened”.
The Cascais city council now seem to have other plans in mind for PDG – namely its destruction, in favour of a new road. There’s no real reason to jeopardise the park – in fact, an approved, alternate urban plan already exists – but the competing financial interests of local politicians are likely behind the pivot. “For years, the solution involved the construction of a tunnel connecting the marginal road to a roundabout north of São João High School,” says journalist João Cunha, explaining that these changes came about as the result of a “new legal regime”. Now, the new, shorter route has been plotted going straight through the skatepark, gutting it.
“Honestly, tears came to my eyes,” said Olympic athlete Gustavo Ribeiro of when he heard the news. The 21-year-old street skater grew up in Cascais and feels indebted to the space the park gave him in his youth. “Parque das Gerações was basically where my entire progress happened,” he told a local reporter, “where families make unique memories, where the Portuguese skateboarding scene was going to evolve.”
But PDG’s skate community isn’t going to let their park go without a fight. The campaign’s social media push has drawn nearly 12k followers to their Instagram page, and Pedro’s petition has already been accepted by Portugal’s Assembly of the Republic – an urban planning scandal is the last thing the country’s tourist economy needs. Bernard is hopeful for the life of the PDG, citing the successful preservation of an iconic, once-threatened skatepark along London’s Southbank. “The skaters got together and created the Long Live Southbank movement, and they managed to save the place by doing petitions, holding events and bringing awareness to people.”
“They were offered a lot of money to leave in the beginning,” he adds. “But they just said: You can’t move history. This is where skateboarding belongs.”
Credits
Photography Gregory Harris
Pictures made with the generous support of Page Location production company and PG photographicas equipment rental company.