The Ria Formosa Natural Park (PNRF) will celebrate 42 years of existence on Saturday, May 2, and created two quizzes online that test – and promote – knowledge about this lagoon area and about one of its most emblematic inhabitants, the seahorse.
O quiz about Ria Formosa can be found at this link. For those who want to test their knowledge of seahorses, must follow this link.
Ria Formosa was classified as a Nature Reserve in 1978, becoming, at the time, the 6th place in Portugal to earn this designation. In the following decade, in 1987, its status was changed to Natural Park.
With this promotion, «in addition to the core objectives of protecting the Ria Formosa lagoon system, its fauna and flora, including migratory species and their habitats, other no less important objectives are defined», illustrates Castelão Rodrigues, the regional director of Nature and Forest Conservation do Algarve, in a message alluding to the park's 42nd anniversary.
Among the new goals are those "related to the promotion of an orderly use of the territory and its natural resources in order to ensure the continuity of evolutionary processes", but also "the promotion of the economic, social and cultural development of the resident population , in order not to harm the natural and cultural values and the planning and discipline of recreational activities in the region, namely on the coast, in order to avoid the degradation of the natural, semi-natural and landscape, aesthetic and cultural elements of the region».
Castelão Rodirgues also recalls the «international importance from an ornithological point of view, housing one of the largest communities of water birds in the country, being a wintering area for shorebirds and an area of great food availability, determining the migration of thousands of birds between the Northern Europe and Africa».
On the other hand, the Ria Formosa is home to «endemic species of great value from the point of view of biodiversity» and has, «over millennia, provided the sustenance of populations that settled there and whose continuity, in the exploitation of natural resources , depends on the health of this exceptional ecosystem'.
"It is in this context that the implementation of the co-management model for protected areas becomes increasingly urgent, based on which it is intended to imprint a dynamic of proximity management, in which different entities put the best at the service of the protected area. they have to offer within the framework of their competences and attributions, putting into practice a participative, collaborative and articulated management», defended the regional director of Nature Conservation and Forests.
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