Portugal

João Pestana is an aeronautical communications specialist. After twenty years of working in the Azores, he returned to Lisbon in 2011 and getting involved in various political movements and citizen protest movements. He self-describes himself as somebody “who just cannot stay stopped” and a firm believer in the need for social change. He was one of the drivers behind the Algés Popular Assembly (1) and participates in the community management of one of its projects – the Factory for Alternatives. ECO123: How did an initiative like the Factory for Alternatives actually emerge? João Pestana: It emerged out of the Algés Popular …

Case 1 From pizzas to slow-travel We wander the streets in which the traditional white of the facades throws back the light and the heat of a January day managing to conjure early spring. We pass a resident and various visiting international tourists, who without exception all greet us with a smile and a “Bom dia” almost as warm as the magnificent weather. We feel something genuine and find it difficult to believe how this village, less than a decade ago, lay in ruins and was down to seven inhabitants. Located in the council of Vila do Bispo, in the …

Case 2 Funchal’s Old Town 28 years ago work began on restoring part of the 500 years of history of the first residential settlement in Funchal, a city symbolic of Portugal’s Era of Exploration. Throughout the previous decades, the city had expanded westwards, leaving behind to continued degradation part of its history: the Santa Maria neighbourhood. Or as it is otherwise known, the ‘Old Town’. Six years on from the discovery of Madeira (1419), the first settlements were established in the east of the bay thereby founding Funchal. The Santa Maria neighbourhood was chosen as the site for building the …

Case 3 Schist Village The architectural style termed vernacular makes recourse to materials and the surrounding territory’s resources as building construction materials with the resulting projects sustainable in nature, integrated into the natural landscape and demonstrating strong local or regional identities. In Portugal, one of the most notable examples are schist constructions. Despite this type of construction being found to a greater or lesser extent nationwide (with much of mainland Portugal rich in this rock), they are particularly to the fore in the Centro region, in the beirãs regions. Profoundly impacted by the migration of their populations to major urban …

Case 4 Factory for Alternatives The effects of restoring a building extend far beyond its physical facet. The project enables the recreation of social relationships, bringing life to abandoned or rundown spaces, generating wealth and dynamics, bringing beauty back to a landscape. And, in the case of the Factory for Alternatives, essentially raising awareness and teaching about different and alternative ways of community living. Located in the centre of Algés, in Lisbon, the Factory for Alternatives is a project under construction and in constant transformation and ongoing for just over three months. The initiative is backed by the Algés Popular …

Gil da Silva Canha sits on Funchal Municipal Council and the councillor responsible for urbanism, directly supervising this and other projects. ECO123: How would you evaluate the restoration project for the Santa Maria historical centre? Gil da Silva Canha: I believe it grew weaker as the recovery of a historical neighbourhoods requires a general plan of action and thus far no such plan has ever been drafted. What was done involved sporadic and individual interventions.

Once upon a time, there were two royal children who were brought up by two Bonelli’s eagles. On 15th and 18th March 2013, they slipped out of their two eggs that had been laid, carefully hidden away in a safe nest made of twigs and leaves high up in a pine tree deep in the forest. The queen had sat on the eggs for 42 days until they hatched. Meanwhile, the king of all the birds flew in circles, slowly using the good thermals to work his way upwards with his 175 cm wide wings to lofty heights to get …

In the 1970s and 1980s, the number of international citizens buying houses or plots for construction in Portugal, with a particular incidence in the Algarve, was at a high level. And they experienced full on the locally prevailing lack of respect for bureaucratic rules and varying from council to council. To make matters worse, many international citizens did not live here full-time and did not keep up to date with the continuous changes ongoing to the legislation. In 1987, AFPOP – the Association of Foreign Property Owners in Portugal was founded and serving as a type of mutual help centre, …

At the IPMA – the Portuguese Institute for the Sea and Atmosphere (1), ECO123 talked with Dr. Pedro Viterbo, a member of the IPCC – the International Panel on Climate Change (2) in order to find out more details on the IPCC’s report and its conclusions. We also questioned him about the role of the IPCC in government decisions and sought to learn more about the actions necessary to fostering sustainability in the economy and its ecology without mortgaging the future of generations to come. ECO123: What is the IPCC?   Pedro Viterbo: The IPCC is a panel set up …

The Cobbler Shoes of one sort or another are as old as the need to protect our feet from the climate and the surrounding territory. From this need emerged the profession of the cobbler. The estimated date for a shoe found in Armenia in 2008 by a group of scientists from the University of Cork (Ireland) come in at around 5500 BC. Despite the art of shoemaking commonly being attributed to ancient Egypt, there is evidence from Palaeolithic paintings found in caves in the south of France that their history actually stretches back to 10000 BC. According to “legend”, in …