The traveling exhibition “A Floresta”, the first of the “La Caixa” Foundation in Portugal, opens this Thursday, July 12, at 17 pm, in the riverside area of Portimão.
Present at the moment will be Isilda Gomes, mayor of Portimão, José Pena do Amaral, member of the Executive Committee of BPI, and Rafael Chueca, corporate director of Territory and Centers of the “la Caixa” Foundation.
This exhibition, now adapted to the reality of Portugal, had more than one million visitors in the various cities in Spain where it was present.
The ”la Caixa” Foundation, the first in Spain and one of the most relevant internationally, this year began implementing its action in Portugal, as a result of BPI's entry into the CaixaBank Group.
«The forest is not a set of trees, but a complex ecosystem where a large number and variety of living beings live and interact», says the organizers of the exhibition.
In addition to providing shelter to all this biodiversity, forests perform a series of fundamental environmental functions for life on the planet to be as we know it.
Thus, the first part of the exhibition focuses on the hierarchical organization of different levels of life, from the biosphere to the microscopic level. At the same time, a journey is made through the different elements that make up and characterize forest ecosystems and their natural dynamics, from the way the growth of trees affects the climate to the relationships established between living beings, passing through the different components and processes that occur on the forest floor.
The protagonists of these ecosystems are trees and the second part of the exhibition is dedicated to them. Trees are multicellular, vegetal and woody living beings that occupy the highest layer of vegetation. It is in this context that the constituent parts of a tree, the support and capture functions of roots and how forests expand through seeds are explained. It also explains the different parts that make up the wood in trees and how climate change influences them.
Currently, the Iberian Peninsula has 21,6 million hectares of forest, which corresponds to 36% of its total surface, just under 60 million hectares.
It is one of the regions with the most biodiversity on the continent and with the largest forest area, this richness being evident in the great diversity of flora and fauna species that inhabit its forests. In this sense, the exhibition features eighteen of the most representative species of the entire Iberian Peninsula.
The public will find a collection of samples of different woods, leaves and fruits that will help to identify and differentiate them from each other, as well as instruments and objects made from these woods. Some of the elements on display are very common in our daily lives, others belong to another era and are a testament to our recent cultural and artisanal heritage.
But not all trees are the same. In all regions there are unique species that stand out from the rest and are known due to some characteristic related to their size, their history or their cultural and traditional dimension. This is the case of the five examples from Portugal represented in the exhibition “A Floresta”: the Oliveira do Mouchão, in Abrantes, the Castanheira de Vales, in Vila Pouca de Aguiar, the eucalyptus of the National Forest of Vale de Canas, in Torres do Mondego, the Azinheira do Porto das Covas, in Loulé, and the Whistler, in Palmela.
Finally, in the last part of the exhibition “Forest and Human Being”, the evolution of the uses that forests have had throughout history and their current role is explained.
This exhibition will run until 28 August and can be visited from Monday to Sunday, from 11:00 am to 14:00 pm and from 17:00 pm to 23:00 pm.
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