Praia da Granja is located in the Northwest of Portugal, and belongs to the Vila Nova de Gaia municipality, Porto District. This place is also located in the town of São Félix da Marinha .
The word Granja means Farm. The geographical location of Granja came from a Bishop Farm situated there in 1758. It belonged at that time to the "Crúzios" Monks and Priests. They used it on hot days as a place to rest and introspect. Portuguese Poetess Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen, who was from Porto, spent the summertime there with her family in their beach house mansion by the sea. The city of Espinho can be found to the south, while the cities of Porto and Gaia can be found to the north.
A seascape is a photograph, painting, or other work of art which depicts the sea, in other words an example of marine art. By a backwards development, the word has also come to mean the view of the sea itself, and be applied in planning contexts to geographical locations possessing a good view of the sea.
In the UK a seascape is defined in planning and land use contexts as a combination of adjacent land, coastline and sea within an area, defined by a mix of land-sea inter-visibility and coastal landscape character assessment, with major headlands forming division points between one seascape area and the next. This approach to coastal landscape planning was developed jointly by Government environmental bodies in Wales (UK) and Ireland in 2000 to assist spatial planning for (at that time new) offshore wind farm developments. The resulting "Guide to best practice in seascape assessment [1]", (Marine Institute, Ireland, 2001), have since been adapted and applied in Scotland [2](Scottish Natural Heritage, UK, 2004) and in England [3](Defra, 2005) and Wales[4] (Countryside Council for Wales, 2009) for guidance to offshore wind farm developers and for carrying out spatial planning assessments.