The situation of the Algarve's natural resources should deserve the reflection of the Algarve and it should be asked what policies are in place to protect and promote them.
Let's try to synthesize some issues. Regional agriculture must adapt (as in the rest of the country, but let us now worry about the Algarve) to the inevitable climate changes, for which Portuguese and foreign scientists predict a progressive worsening towards aridity.
Cultivation practices and irrigation techniques must (should…) be the object of continuous investigation and experimentation. But it is enough to see the state of disrepair in which the facilities of the Regional Directorate of Agriculture, in Patacão, namely those intended for experimentation, in which very competent and dedicated technicians worked, are enough to realize that there is no longer any work on improving agriculture. algarvia (certainly the same happens in the other Portuguese Regional Directorates). “Less State for Better State” is bearing fruit.
The streams and water lines, through which the sometimes torrential rains flow that fall on the region, are, for the most part, in the state of neglect shown in the photo (see photo below). They are no longer clean since the liberal mentality ended with workers indispensable to the conservation of the territory, such as the kingfishers, who had the same fate as the forest guards and the road cornerers.
Any flood that occurs can lead to catastrophic behavior, with this lack of cleaning of the water lines.
Quinta da Ombria is one of the most regrettable attacks on the environmental quality and on the correct planning of the territory and on the exploitation of the potential of the interior of the Region.
What is being done there was typical of tourist developments in the 60s, when ecological and environmental concerns were still incipient.
And it's amazing how the environmental authorities, always so concerned at times with petty things, thought that none of it was serious: they cut through one of the best inland valleys with a road in landfill on high-quality soils, when the The road could have been leaning against the base of the slope and did not harm the landscape and the soil resource.
They allowed the stream to be completely diverted, changing its original bed, to create artificial lakes that have nothing to do with the local landscape, they created a new landscape, as if they were in nothingness, despising Nature and territory; bridges and more bridges waiting for the colossal floods that that stream sometimes suffers to take them down the valley.
They cut a line of fissure to pass a road, an expendable wound in the landscape. Public roads were interrupted and everything indicates that they are preparing to surround everything with a net fence. And even the street lighting is supplied by the public network.
And the Environment and Nature Conservation authorities said nothing. There must have even been an Environmental Impact Study confirming all those diatribes…
The investors seem to be Finnish, they waited a few decades before they managed to make this desperation – one could ask them if, in their land, the Authorities would allow an intervention of this caliber to be made…
This has been going on for a long time, I'll stop here, for now.
Author Fernando Pessoa, landscape architect
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