Anyone who reads this book “will never again look at the rocks of the city of Loulé in the same way”. This is assured by Hélder Pereira and Francisco Lopes, the authors of the book “Histórias Gravadas nas Rochas. Field Guide: Discovering Rocks and Fossils in Loulé”, which was presented last week at the City Hall in Loulé.
The work, an edition of the Municipality of Loulé/Municipal Museum, invites you to walk around the city and discover rocks and fossils, with millions of years.
«This is a very old idea, which began to materialize with students from the Loulé Secondary School. That was what served as the basis for the work that we ended up developing and deepening», he told the Sul Informação Hélder Pereira, who, like Francisco Lopes, is a professor of biology and geology.
The two authors of the book are also the founders of GeoWalks & Talks, Algarve geotourism company.
«We walked the streets of the city, with a slightly different look, a trained eye, in order to understand the stories that are hidden from view, in the rocky materials used in the construction of the city – the walls, the monuments, the pavements and the walls of buildings,” he added.
Basically, it is about «finding the stories that exist in the rocks, whether that is told by the fossils of living beings that lived millions of years ago, in oceans, some of them already missing, whether it is the oldest rock in Loulé or others that came from other continents».
The book is a tool that allows «exploring the city in an unusual way, valuing and promoting heritage. The perspective is always to reach the general public, but it can also be used by more specific audiences, namely by schools», explained, for his part, Francisco Lopes.
“This resource can be explored at the pedagogical level, of scientific dissemination – if anyone wants to deepen the work that has been done at the scientific level, they can also do so – and by tourists who visit the city”, he added, speaking to Sul Informação.
The version of the book that was released is bilingual – Portuguese and English – thinking of visitors and, in a way, of those who do business in the city.
«A tourist who comes here will not just do the route. Going into a cafe or a restaurant, you can stay for the night and even stay overnight. A dynamic will be created in the city that did not exist before. It can be a way to attract more people to boost the local economy», believes Francisco Lopes.
So that the book could reach everyone, the authors were careful to use "a simple language, but scientifically correct, in order to demystify the science behind what we can see in the rocks of the city."
“What we really want is to get people to look at stone materials from a completely different perspective. Our students, on the way between their homes and the school, pass by places and tell us: “I pass here every day and I had never noticed that there was this fossil of a shell” or something like that. Hearing this type of comments makes us fully satisfied», summarized Hélder Pereira.
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