Municipality of Mação, district of Santarém
It is there, in the village of Freixoeirinho (Cardigos), that the geographical center of Portugal is located, according to calculations by mathematician João Filipe Queiró, from the University of Coimbra.
Gonçalo Crisóstomo, from the Portuguese Geographic Institute, added that this location corresponds to the geodetic center of the country, which is not necessarily the same as the geographical center.
The geodetic center is the “zero coordinate in cartographic terms”, meaning that all national cartographic measurements are made starting from that point, with all other coordinates referenced to this origin.
Aware of the existence of the geodetic center, João Filipe Queiró then set out, out of personal interest, to study mathematically where the geographical center of the country would be located—something that proved to be far from simple.
“In a circle or a square, the center raises no major questions,” says Queiró, “but in a country it is much more complicated.” For this reason, the mathematician divided the map of the country into increasingly smaller rectangles, “then applying integral calculus formulas and arriving at double integrals calculated using Green’s theorem,” he explained.
In a parallel calculation, which led to the same conclusion, he replaced the map of the country with a set of triangles occupying the entire mainland territory, calculated the center of each triangle, and then determined the “center of the centers”.
João Filipe Queiró concluded, with a margin of error that he considers “small”—though not quantified—that the geographical center of Portugal is not located at Picoto da Melriça, near Vila de Rei, but rather slightly further southeast, between the villages of Amêndoa and Freixoeirinho, already within the municipality of Mação.
However, this conclusion did not surprise Jorge Teixeira Pinto, also from the Portuguese Geographic Institute, who had carried out a similar study about four years earlier.
(Source: Jornal Público)
Prof. Rogério Martins (University of Coimbra)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8RzAEW62gOw
(Source: SIC)