The smoke that unites us

None of this is new. Quite the opposite

Burnt cork oaks in the Azilheira area – Photo: Pedro Lemos | Sul Informação

Once again, this time from S. Marcos da Serra, columns of smoke trace the skies of the Algarve.

In addition to signaling the fire that was raging, these smoke signals communicated and reminded the Algarve of the only aspect in which it is territorially cohesive, from Barlavento to Sotavento: vulnerability and exposure to this risk.

A very short time ago we had received this regional identity trait, a kind of reminder, materialized in the fire that, breaking out near the University of Algarve, traveled along a coastal fringe, even affecting delicatessen landscapes such as Quinta do Lago or Vale do Lobo.

It was thus demonstrated to satiety that, from the vernacular and abandoned to the good gourmet food and lively, the entire Algarve landscape can burn.

Precisely because it has risk as a – sad – factor of territorial cohesion.

In this case, unlike Ludo, the framing is more “conventional”. The economic asymmetries of the tertiary, “touristified”, massively gentrified and “coastalized” Algarve drag demography behind them, creating depopulated landscapes, increasingly abandoned to chance.

In a Mediterranean context, of deeply worked territories, in which “it was more the sweat shed in the clearing of the slopes (…) than in the construction of the pyramids”, as Matvejevitch warns precisely in his Mediterranean Breviary, the disappearance of human activities, which designed the landscapes and gave them texture, through labors such as pastoralism, agriculture and the exploitation of multiple uses of woods and woods, what remains is a simplified cloak.

Since the design of landscapes is crucial for the design of fire routes in its progression, the consequence is equally simple: the fire has an open path to advance, without major obstacles or the need to change speed.

But none of this is new. Quite the opposite.

While it is true that certain isolated public and private initiatives exist and subsist, which with merit try to animate and revitalize certain sectors of the Algarve mountains, the truth is that measures as structural as the problems to which they must seek to respond are delayed - preferably in an interpretation of the concept “structural” that differs from the particular, and curiously very liberal, interpretation that the Government makes of it: “laissez faire, laissez passer, le monde va de lui même” (let it go, let it go, and the world goes by itself), in line with Vincent de Gournay.

It was thought that the Landscape Transformation Program (PTP), created in 2020, could be a decisive impetus to change this. Specifically, through their operational extensions, the Landscape Reorganization and Management Programs (PRGP), as well as other recommended measures and, mainly considering the guiding principles, defined by the Resolution of the Council of Ministers no. June.

Among these, we highlight the “support and remuneration for the transformation of the landscape in the long term”, the “adoption of public policies of an environmental nature that align the interests of society and future generations with those of land owners and managers, in order to promote greater inter-territorial and intergenerational justice, guaranteeing the proper valuation of rural property and the promotion of sustainable management", the "defense of the public interest in assuming the management of unmanaged rustic buildings with no known owner, namely in what concerns refers to the execution of actions to defend the forest against fires” and the “definition of expeditious and flexible intervention models, particularly in the post-fire period”.

However, it takes a while to get into cruising speed, and despite the ambition of the name and scope, a more careful analysis shows that PTP and PRGP consist of a set of measures for the recovery of burned areas and for the prevention and minimization of risks in susceptible to burning, because they restrict their scope of application to such contexts.

That in itself is not bad. But it has already been tried. And it forces us to always go after the damage.

By adopting a reductive and sectorial understanding of the concept of landscape – narrowed to the criteria of danger and burned areas – the PTP, as a whole, goes against the guidelines of the Independent Technical Commission that analyzed the great fires in mainland Portugal in 2017, which recommended a new vision for the national landscape as a whole, since only in an integrated and territorially cohesive way can social, cultural and economic dynamics be generated capable of balancing the territorial model, and revitalizing areas currently undergoing a cycle of dehumanization and abandonment.

Still, being what there is, it's what we have to work with right away. Work yourself then.

Given the traumatic magnitude of some of the most recent fires in the Algarve, this one even leaves us with the embarrassing circumstance of being able to consider it as not very big, citing, at the time of writing this article, with the fire in resolution, the burned area somewhere close to 1500 hectares. It is then a moderate warning, the second from this area in a short range.

Even so, in this relative moderation, an interesting effort to preserve the mountain's identity and memory suffered, the route of landscape interpretation and cultural awareness of Fontes Boião – Azilheira, severely affected.

In parallel with this erosion of identity, territorial anecdotes progress, in a region just for tourists to see. See Feira da Serra, in São Brás de Alportel, which was once an uncompromising event in the representation of people, arts, crafts and mountain knowledge, this year it even has a beach bar.

In other words, in the Algarve, even the Serra has to disguise itself as the coast, to make sense.

At least until it burns. Then, again and literally, the illusions vanish.

 

Author Gonçalo Gomes is a landscape architect, president of the Algarve Regional Section of the Portuguese Association of Landscape Architects (APAP).
(and writes according to the old Spelling Agreement)

 

 



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