Life

Saturday, the 18th of November 2023. Fancy an ocean with a mountain view in the south of Portugal in early December, in the Monchique mountains, with the Atlantic stretching out at your feet? Starting Friday 1 December (public holiday) and Saturday 2 December through Sunday 3 December, the Monchique mountains are hosting their annual hiking festival. The town hall of this small mountain village is putting on over a dozen different hikes, well worth your while taking the train and bus to make an extended weekend out of it. Getting off the train at Portimão station, you take Line 94 …

Saturday 11th November 2023. Nearly everything has been said about the possible mining of lithium in northern Portugal. As far back as in autumn 2019, four years ago now, ECO123 was already taking an in-depth look at this issue. This is something you might want to read up on again? Clicking on https://eco123.info/portugal/entrevistas/o-legado-que-vou-deixar-aos-meus-filhos-e-o-que-a-mina-la-deixar/ will take you to our extensive ECO 123 archive. That’s when you’ll understand why Portugal’s Prime Minister has now stepped down, and why active and passive corruption rears its ugly head again and again with issues shaping our future, clean energy, the ability to live in a …

Saturday 26th August 2023. For a good while now, since the major forest fire of 2003 in Monchique, our ECO123 team has been looking at minimizing the risk of forest fires. You see, we live and work in a burnt-down forest near Monchique. In a way, we are also doing the job of a reinsurance company. As we speak, forests are burning in all southern countries of Europe on a daily basis. However, a country that has been particularly hard hit this year is a large country that normally doesn’t feature on the map as a high-risk area, namely the …

Saturday, 18th february 2023. Nestle, Unilever, Procter & Gamble. This is the gamut of the top companies polluting our world with plastic. Do you know what actually happens to the plastics that you and I dutifully drop off at the Ecoponto to be recycled? Well, do you? At the moment, the play „Alice in the Wonderland of Waste“ (Alice no País do Lixo), staged by the AORCA troupe in Lagos looks at the issue of waste recycling using drama and dance. Last Tuesday I atched the dress rehearsal, for there can be no review without seeing the actual play performed. Which is why I …

Planting trees is the most effective measure against the overheating of the Earth. Maybe in a few years‘ time humanity will come to the realisation that part of our salvation lies in rebelling, i.e planting trees as if our lives depended on it and reanimating landscapes wherever possible… This is the way 48-year old Jochen Schilk puts it in his book Re-Greening the World “50 infectious stories about planting trees”. Rarely have I been sent a book in such an unconventional way. One Friday morning as I opened my letterbox down by the road there it was, wrapped in brown …

Born in Porto on 10 May 1951, José Francisco de Almeida Pacheco is a teacher, anthropologist and pedagogue. ECO123 had a chat with this resourceful educationalist, who has brought greater democracy to educational management, and asked him what value nature has in education in Portugal. Do you think that nowadays, when UN ambassador Jane Goodall is saying that human beings, the most intelligent creatures on Earth, are destroying their planet, it still makes sense to educate children? This was a question I asked 55 years ago, in 1968, when I was living in a country that was under a dictatorial …

Lesley Martin is 76 years old and is still teaching and practising permaculture. Her father was in the RAF, so she moved around a lot as a child, finding it difficult to describe where she comes from: “I was born in Wales, but my attachment to Wales is slight. I studied Architecture at university, but I really wanted to be a farmer…” After four years, she realised she absolutely did not want to be an architect and quit. This greatly upset her father, yet, some years later, he gave her the money to set up her own farm in Cornwall. …

Saturday, the 17th of December 2022 Now, the other day I was reading in ECO123 that the town of Monchique was threatened with extinction. And the same magazine carried an online job advert. What can I say? I’ll blame coincidence for the fact that I left Leipzig, unable to resist my curiosity, and started on my way to Monchique, nestling in the mountains of the same name. I wanted that job. And here is my story.   Travelling is supposed to be fun; it should be safe, as fast as possible and cheap too of course. Now for years we …

Saturday the 15th of October 2022. Today I would like to tell you about a book that is well worth reading, published in both Portuguese and English. This is in fact a publication that remains very topical today. The two authors offer up the 200 most important plants forming part of the natural world of Portugal‘s southwestern coast, so readers can get to know them, and have left this work for all eternity. Comprising 256 pages, this book forms an indispensable part of a sustainable life. It‘s like the salt in the soup and self-published, in the way everything that’s …