Short Stories

Saturday 18th january 2025. The pictures and films we are currently seeing from California are disturbing. At this very same moment in time, we are installing the tenth high-power sprinkler in our own forest, while we receive the news that the forest and mountains near Los Angeles are ablaze and the winds are mutating into storms and fuelling the fires that are now destroying entire communities. This distinctly reminds us of what happened in the Monchique mountains during the week of 3-10 August 2018, when, according to police reports, a high-voltage E-Redes power line was repeatedly touching against a eucalyptus …

Saturday 11th January 2025. A Happy New Year to all our readers in 2025! As guardians (or rather graveyard keepers) of the language, neither the German nor the Portuguese publishing houses could bring themselves to give the Italian writer, doctor, painter and politician Carlo Levi, born in Turin in 1902, a permanent place in their literary programmes. The fear of the political disease of fascism was, and still is, very real, and not only in Munich. “Do we want to seize the opportunity now?” an editor at C.H. Beck in the Bavarian metropolis must have asked himself, “before the fascists …

Saturday 4th january 2025. It’s a New Year. Have you made it? And your good resolutions? Live a climate-neutral life? And reduce your carbon footprint? Reduce the amount of waste? Eat a healthy diet? Wait a minute. We can make you a very special offer. Our cooperative has booked a speaker, a permaculture teacher called Lesley Martin. She will be offering our readers a weekend course in March, April and May, in which you can find out what you need to do to produce good food from good soil: potatoes, onions, carrots and courgettes, as well as tomatoes, garlic, cucumbers …

Saturday 14th December 2024. According to the Copernicus Climate Change Service, the EU’s Earth Observation Programme, this current year is set to be the warmest since records began. I couldn’t look away, for I have always kept a close eye on things, so that I also treat trees if I have to and am allowed to. When the bark beetle invaded my pine trees (pinheiro bravo) and this type of insect threatened to destroy my beautiful mixed forest, I spent a few days looking for ways to outwit the bark beetle so that it wouldn’t eat my hundred-year-old pine trees …

Saturday, 7th december 2024. There are people and there are people: some help; others put obstacles in the way. Such as high-voltage power lines. A few days ago, an employee from e-redes, the former EDP electricity supply company, came to visit us in Caldas de Monchique, and she had brought a photo of an umbrella pine in her briefcase. It was the 120-year-old umbrella pine from our botanical garden, which has survived all the forest fires so far, including the last one in 2018. I had stood next to it with a garden hose and extinguished the fire all around …

Saturday 23rd November 2024. Jeremy Walton is 47 years old and a qualified computer technician. He went to school in Monchique and Portimão and studied in Faro. Jeremy has lived in Monchique for 42 years and has a very special hobby. He gardens and has a thing for trees and plants. Is this because he has developed an understanding of nature? ECO123 interviewed him while he was working in the botanical garden and wanted to find out what motivates him… ECO123: Jeremy, you have lived in Monchique for a long time, since you were a child. You haven’t become a …

Saturday 16th November 2024. Answer: Firstly, by no longer taking part in ineffective UN climate conferences, such as the one currently taking place in Baku, Azerbaijan (COP 29). On the one hand, we should stop flying*, and, on the other hand, we should systematically plant new, young trees in sensible places. Biologist Sonia Soares from Algoz practised this last Friday: with children from the Silves South school group in Algoz, at the EB 2/3 school. On the one hand, she is reducing the carbon footprint and burning less paraffin and, on the other hand, converting the CO2 already in the …

Saturday 9th November 2024. We recently had a very special kind of visitor. One Sunday morning, at ECO123’s botanical forest garden in Caldas de Monchique, we were visited (without being asked) by hunters with their dogs. Then the shooting started. I shouted loud and clear that they should please be considerate and stop their shooting immediately, and I was lucky. They left our magazine’s private property, although they were not happy about it, because they wanted to shoot partridges and hares and take them away with them. That set me thinking. Since then, I’ve been wondering whether these hunters learned …

Saturday 2nd November 2024. On Saturday 19 October, ECO123 was invited to take part in an event for journalists, organised by Agrobio (1), under the scope of a European programme, with its main aim being to provide a lunch made from organic foodstuffs for us to sample and appreciate. In addition, we visited a street market selling organic products and an organic supermarket. This is an increasingly important subject in Portugal, considering that, at this moment in time, 27.7% of farmland in Portugal is already given over to organic production. 70% of this land is used for grazing, and therefore …