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Between Thursday 27 and Saturday 29 December, the International Hiking Week 2018 offers guided walks with different themes. Between Christmas and the New Year, nature lovers will have the opportunity to get to know the landscape of the Algarve mountains on seven trails of varying lengths. On foot, we get to know Monchique through all our senses: the mountains with …

Sadly, nothing is new as far as trains are concerned. The year is almost over, and anyone who buys their train ticket from Covilhã to Guarda (60 km) online at www.cp.pt has to go through Entroncamento and Coimbra B, making a detour of more than 500 km, only because, since 2009, there is a bridge in Belmonte that is at …

Gradually, new options for mobility are gaining speed. The PAN (People-Animals-Nature Political Party) recognised that the state should promote the purchase of electric bicycles with a 20% incentive up to a maximum of 200 euros in 2019. The only deputy of this small but efficient party in the Lisbon Parliament, André Silva, told us that he wants to take Sweden …

  Flying, travelling by car, eating meat and sausages, are some of the most aggravating factors of a person’s ecological “balance sheet”. How can you explain to people that less can be more? Not using the car also always means a reduction of stress, at least in the city. And whoever exchanges their car for a bike, improves their footprint …

Clay, palm, reed, wicker, cork, wood and flax, words of the earth which speak of the roots of a people and which can transform lives. They increase the value of our lives. The arts are dying, but there are still people who work together so that this heart continues to beat. This is what is behind the TASA Project (Ancestral …

A good many success stories in agriculture have begun with people’s hands in the soil. At CEARTE too, the Portuguese professional training centre for handicrafts and heritage (Centro de Formação Profissional para o Artesanato e Património) based in Coimbra, dexterity is required. Alongside traditional forms of handicraft, ecological farming is also taught. Cultivation methods from the past (técnicas de cultivo …

When we go for a walk in the countryside we are far from understanding the value of the magnificent plants that live in the soil. Over and beyond their beauty, they can accompany us on our life’s journey, protecting our health and healing the body and mind at times of recuperation. Each year, more than 2,000 new plants are discovered. …

It’s a shame that so little good foreign literature finds its way to Portugal. This is presumably due to the fact that we live so far away, out here on the edge of Europe, with just a single neighbour and so much sea around us. This makes us a little isolated. But if we were to look at it from …

ECO123 talked to Cassandra Jorge Querido (aged 54), a landscape architect who was born in Évora and has been working for the past 26 years on matters relating to the environment. We met in the picnic area, at Benafim, in the municipality of Loulé, beneath an oak-tree, a holm-oak tree that is over 500 years old. We talked and had …

Organic foods from organic seeds Creation offers us the whole range of nature, and what do we do with it? ECO123 wanted to know exactly, and visited the public limited company Sementes Vivas SA, which was founded three years ago in Idanha-a-Nova in the district of Castelo Branco near the Spanish border. Sementes Vivas (literally “Living Seeds”) comprises 30 young …