SPOTLIGHT ON: THE COA VALLEY
Following the plot to revive an important part of the Portuguese rural heartland.
In Portugal’s Greater Côa Valley, rural abandonment has taken root and wildfires rage through the uninhabited land. But now, an alternative land-use model is emerging – one that looks to harness the region’s natural heritage to create more resilient landscapes
Miguel Pontes grimaces at the devastation that surround him. He kills the motorcycle’s engine. Then, a strange stillness – no birdsong, no wind, just the sound of his boots crunching the blackened debris underfoot. He removes his helmet and the acrid scent of cindered scrub hits his nose. Gazing out to a granite ridge just beyond the village of Pinhel, an ebony cloak has fallen over the valley. ‘When I first came across this fire, I found three red-legged partridge chicks, their feathers burned, looking completely lost,’ he remembers.
As the fire surveillance monitor at Rewilding Portugal, Pontes sets out each day into the Greater Côa
Valley, scouring the ridges for plumes of smoke, which often rise from deliberately lit fires, ignited to clear away saplings and scrub. ‘This is the old way of doing things – just burn the land to clean it,’ he says.
Every few minutes, the skies awaken with lightning and the quiet is broken by a thunderclap. Concerned by the worsening conditions, Pontes rejoins the team in the Land Rovers. From the safety of the vehicle, Pedro Prata – team leader at Rewilding Portugal – checks a wildfire app for areas at risk of ignition. With the storm brewing, he has reason to be nervous – he knows how easily they can start. He grew up on farmland in the Serra da Estrela mountains during the 1980s, spending summers in fear of the fires that would inevitably come. As economic hardship has increased in Portugal’s rural interior, wildfire-prone conditions have swept across lands that are subject to searing summer temperatures. Here in the Côa Valley – a 300,000-hectare expanse in the north of Portugal – a fifth has burned in the last decade. In one area, Vale de Madeira, landscape-scale fires come every 2.7 years – far higher than the natural background rate.
Wildfires are becoming more frequent and intense around the world as temperatures rise, but in the Côa Valley, a number of factors collide. Beginning in the 1960s, Portugal experienced waves of migration out of rural regions. As the country’s economy expanded, young people were lured from rural areas to the diversifying, well-paid jobs in urban centres. Then, between 2011 and 2014, as Portugal underwent a painful international bailout during the EU’s debt crisis, about 50,000 people a year – mostly young – left the country. Unemployment reached 17.6 per cent, rising to more than 40 per cent among under 25s. In northern Portugal today, 74 per cent of active farms are managed by people over the age of 55.
Results from the General Agricultural Census show that during the peak of the rural exodus, agricultural holdings in rural Portugal dropped by 27 per cent within just a decade. As rural regions have been drained of young people, farms have been abandoned and the level of grazing by domestic livestock has dropped precipitously, in turn allowing fire-prone vegetation to rise up. ‘We’re seeing so much bush and scrub come up – if someone starts a fire here, the land just lights up,’ says Prata.
As the Land Rover careens down the valley’s dirt roads, dilapidated farmhouses slide into view, schist walls crumbling onto parched soils. Rows of unkempt, unharvested almond and olive trees have grown thick; dense stands of eucalyptus and pine dot the surrounding hills. ‘Many of these forest structures are plantations from the reforestation programme,’ says Prata. During the 1960s, the Portuguese government attempted to stimulate the rural timber economy by reforesting 320,000 hectares of rural landscape, he explains. But instead of the diverse mix of holm and cork oaks, junipers, cypress and fruit trees that would have once comprised Portugal’s old-growth forests, the chosen species were eucalyptus and pine – which have evolved to disperse with fire.
‘They are not even indigenous to the region,’ adds Maria Almeida, a social and political scientist from the University of Lisboa who, like many others, believes that the reforestation programme, while important economically, came with trade-offs. ‘With the dense monocultures, fires are bigger and less easily controlled. It wasn’t the best choice of species.’ Many also believe that the reforestation project helped to further push shepherds and pastoralists off the land; over the ages, that pressure mixed with depopulation to leave the areas around monoculture plantations bereft of domestic herbivores. As a result, the seeds of eucalyptus and pine disperse widely on the winds and saplings then shoot up on ungrazed ground, further extending the carpet of fire-prone vegetation.
Driving through the valley, we pass a stand of burned tree trunks on the roadside. ‘This was from one of the
‘People often say that fires are a natural function of the ecosystem – yes, but not when the ecosystem is missing other crucial functions’
worst years we’ve seen,’ says Prata, referring to the fires of 2017, which claimed the lives of 106 people. Near the Côa River, a lone eucalyptus stands at the very edge of a sea of black, just metres from the road. Its leaves are speckled green and black, half scorched by the heat that welled up from beneath.
‘Local municipalities were supposed to clear the areas near roads, but they didn’t because the population was too sparse to even apply the political pressure to do it,’ says Almeida. ‘Local governments often ask: “Clearance is expensive, so why should we spend money if there’s no-one there?”’
A NATURAL ALTERNATIVE
Despite its challenges, the Côa Valley is a place of rich history, where wild, granite-walled valleys trace the Côa River’s southward journey. Griffon vultures soar overhead; cork and holm oaks rise from terracotta soils; and, despite being persecuted, fragmented wolf populations still range. Rewilding Portugal believes that this natural heritage is the Côa Valley’s greatest asset, one that could be put to better use.
Working with the NGOs Associação Transumância e Natureza (ATN) and Zoo Logical, as well as the University of Aveiro and Rewilding Europe, it aims to create a 120,000-hectare corridor for Iberian wildlife in which vegetation is broken up by fire breaks, naturally engineered by released herbivores. Its strategy involves purchasing abandoned and marginal land that already abuts protected areas using private and public funds from the Endangered Landscapes Programme (ELP). Controlled releases of wild and semi-wild herbivores will then create a mosaic of fire-resistant vegetation. The idea is to mimic the landscape as it once was, when wild horses, ibex and red and roe deer roamed through diverse forests and grasslands. ‘People often say that fires are a natural function of the ecosystem – yes, but not when the ecosystem is missing other crucial functions. Where are the herbivores? Where are the natural forests? These are questions I often think about when I hear that,’ says Prata. The ultimate goal is to see the region’s other wildlife conserved. Rewilding Portugal believe that its return will help to lure nature-loving international tourists to a region where economic depression has taken root.
The Faia Brava nature reserve – a 1,000-hectare protected area – functions as the model from which a lacework of protected areas is now emerging.
Since 2006, around 45 wild Garrano horses and herds of tauros (descendents of Europe’s native cattle, the auroch) have been released into the wider area. Crossing the Côa River into Faia Brava, these
herbivores leave their mark on the vegetation – subtle to the untrained eye, but obvious to ecologists.
João Neves, a field biologist at ATN, adjusts the brim of his hat and kneels down to inspect the ground. ‘These are wild hare droppings – that’s a promising sign,’ he says. ‘Here is tauros and this is from the wild horses. All this dung is effectively the nutrients and biomass that would otherwise have been burned through expensive and risky control operations. Grazers deliberately snap and break younger trees to create more open conditions – like gardeners, managing their landscape. They disperse seeds as they move and their trampling creates niches for insects; dung beetles come in and spread the dung, fertilising the soils and helping the vegetation to diversify. If you have grazing, locals and government officials will not need to cut or burn the scrub, bushes and young trees as often.’
In much of the Côa Valley, the soils are degraded, but in Faia Brava, the landscape exhibits early signs of transformation. Grasslands stretch out before increasingly diverse stands of scrub and trees; young cork oaks, wild pistachio and junipers rise up, their branches sometimes twisted and gnarled by a melee of hungry mouths.
With this cycle of nutrients once more in motion, the hope is that more fire-resistant species will thrive. ‘The native forests that were historically in northern Portugal – the chestnuts, holm and cork oaks, crabtrees – they were all naturally more resistant to fire,’ says Almeida. Many of these Portuguese natives evolved thicker cambiums – the growth-giving section of the trunk – which act as fire retardants. ‘We have to remember that all of these vegetational species evolved together with the herbivores,’ says João Neves. ‘We seem to have forgotten that over the years.’ The approach of reuniting them serves a dual purpose: to diversify the vegetation while also creating habitat for a more diverse suite of animal species.
Since the early days, this work has expanded. In May 2021, a herd of Sorraia horses was released into nearby Vale Carapito and Rewilding Portugal is working towards the reintroduction of roe deer and ibex. ‘All of these natural processes take time. Purchasing land for conservation is a way to buy that time and to set these natural processes in motion,’ says Prata.
Despite its challenges, the Côa Valley is a place of rich history, where wild, granite-walled valleys trace the Côa River’s southward journey
RENEWED RURAL PURPOSE
The next morning sees the Land Rover weaving past neat, terraced quince plantations. Although vast areas have been abandoned, this is one sector that still thrives. ‘All this began after the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy [CAP] was revised in 2018,’ says Prata, a sea of orderly lines flashing by the windows. ‘You can see how far these monocultures extend.’
The Portuguese Rural Development Programme – an arm of the CAP that aims to increase the contribution of rural regions to the economy – allows farmers
to gain access to incentives worth €8 billion. One objective of the subsidies, outlined in 2020, is to ‘support sectors at risk of abandonment or with no cultivation alternatives’. Farmers are eligible to receive up to €900 per hectare per year in subsidies for fruit trees such as quince. ‘They need support, but here the use of the CAP is not really an agricultural policy – it’s a social one, designed to keep people economically active on the land,’ says Prata. ‘And it has huge implications for how the entire landscape is used.’ Almeida holds a similar opinion. ‘The government wants to bring economic results to the rural interior,’ she says. ‘That equates to high export numbers and intensive production, so that agriculture is financially stimulated.’
Rewilding Portugal’s enterprise officer, Daniel Veríssimo, says that ‘subsidies create dependencies’. He believes that farmers often pivot their crops to those that draw the highest handouts. ‘Every time the music of the CAP changes, so does the dance of rural communities.’ Amid economic depression, many remaining farmers have extended monoculture plantations to receive more subsidy income – often onto marginal lands. This, says Rewilding Portugal, is a short-term solution – one that offers farmers little autonomy while encroaching on marginal space that could otherwise contribute to the health of the local environment.
Change may be coming for this type of subsidydriven, intensified agriculture. The UN Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) recently released the draft of an agreement designed to halt the ecological destruction of the planet by the end of the decade. Included within it was a call for a third of climatechange mitigation strategies to come from nature by 2030. Subsidies that are deleterious to biodiversity have been a primary focus. Target 18 of the draft asserts that incentive schemes harmful to the environment must be reduced or reformed by at least US$500 billion per year and that all incentives must be either positive or neutral for biodiversity by 2030.
Where would this leave those dependent on subsidies? One suggestion that could help tilt farmers away from intensification is for ecosystem services such as water retention and carbon sequestration to be incentivised within the CAP. Almeida has heard governments raise these kinds of payments for ecosystem services, but for now she believes words come cheaper than action. ‘It has been spoken about lots, but governments have failed to implement the idea so far,’ she says.
Yet research suggests that such a scheme could work well in this region. Environmental-economics researcher Stanzi Litjens from Lund University in Sweden has calculated that across just 36,000 hectares of agricultural land in the Côa Valley, the creation of mosaiced grasslands and scrub through natural grazing could bring 90,000 carbon credits to market per year, bringing in €2.1 million annually.
Despite calls for such land-use reform, opposition to modern conservation approaches persists. Rewilding Portugal’s targeting of marginal, abandoned land has often been a complicated process – for one, Portugal’s land registry system was only officiated in 1954 and is irregularly updated. Debates over who owns what are often subjective and interest from conservationists can unearth truculent voices claiming ownership.
‘Most of the time, they have little use for the land, but simply mistrust modern conservation,’ says Prata. Some farmers have even planted rumours that the NGO is clandestinely releasing wolves into the Côa Valley – hearsay that Aliácar says represents ‘the modern disconnection with the old ways of sharing the land with nature’.
Yet, as outlined in the CBD’s 2030 draft biodiversity targets, the planet stands at an inflection point in the environmental and biodiversity crises. Catarina Rosa, a conservationist working on a separate project in northern Portugal, believes that an outdated unwillingness to share space with nature will eventually
An unwillingness to share space with nature will eventually be supplanted by an environmentally friendly, younger generation
be supplanted by a more environmentally friendly, younger generation, willing to return to rural areas and connect with the natural systems about which they are concerned. ‘Grandparents who had tough lives in rural areas have transmitted that to their children,’ she says. ‘That has historically propagated the mentality that these are just places of hardship, not to be lived in. But now there’s a cultural shift towards nature – it has taken many generations, but it’s starting.’
Tourism presents another opportunity. Naturebased tourism in the Côa Valley is already burgeoning: Star Camp, Casa da Cisterna, Wildlife Portugal and Miles Away are all new businesses started by Côa
Valley locals and the European Safari Company operates popular tours in the valley. The challenge will be to demonstrate that the model can be effective at scale. There are still other urgent problems that will need to be resolved. ‘The dialogue has focused
on tourism being the saviour, but there needs to be broader government investment in stable industries of locally produced materials, basic communications infrastructure and schools,’ says Almeida. ‘If tourism ramps up, there needs to be a parallel investment into basic services and that’s political.’
DAMMING OF THE CÔA
Back on the road and travelling south into the valley from Foz de Côa, Prata points across to a concrete line that juts like a scar across the gorge. ‘You see the dam’s foundations there? That’s how close we came to losing this whole landscape,’ he says.
Contemporary land-use debates would have been settled long ago if the proposed construction of the Côa dam had gone ahead in 1995. Were it not for the discovery of a hugely impressive string of paleolithic engravings, and the activism of locals that ensued, the dam would have stopped the Côa’s natural flow and the reservoir would have flooded the valley.
While the archaeological history carried the bulk of political influence, Prata believes that what was really saved was an ancient, linear record of the valley’s natural history – a symbolic connection to the land and the nature that sustains it. ‘The people achieved something wonderful by connecting with this environment’s heritage,’ he says. ‘Look at what could have been.’
Some say that the Côa dam saga highlights a choice made long ago – that the region’s natural heritage is not to be overwritten. Prata believes that that same natural heritage can be called upon to enhance a region in need of revitalisation. To him, the scars of the dam, etched halfway into the landscape, mark a line between two possible futures.