Short Stories

Saturday the 11th of February 2023. These days, if you are thinking about building a house or restoring an old ruin you really will be forced to conduct a thorough study of your building materials and prices. Over the course of the past year alone, the price of construction materials such as steel, glass, cement and bricks increased by 30 to 40, some even up to 50 per cent. Add to this substantially higher interest rates applied to bank loans and more demanding efficiency specifications for new buildings, as well as the possibility of falling real estate prices. And this …

Saturday 21st January 2023. Many state schools in Portugal are currently closed, as the teachers are on strike once again. The plan is to pressure the Ministry of Education. This is the way they’ve chosen to pressure the Ministry of Education and force a favourable response to their demands. In truth those finishing high school in 2023 can more or less forget about sitting their exams. Let’s take one example: at the Poeta António Aleixo school in Portimao (who wants to live there anyway?) this works in a very perfidious way: the school, just like any other, is equipped with …

Saturday 14th January 2023. Today’s big news was this: humanity has crossed the threshold of eight billion. So what do the good teachers of Portugal do? What will we remember them for? That’s right, they’re on strike. Once again. This time the issue is their career paths within the state school system. They are striking because they are altruistically thinking of their missed prospects of promotion. Very funny. Just visualise this. Those poor poor teachers. Fair enough, they are not exactly in a good place. Entry-level salaries are meagre, not even reaching 1,000 euros. And this after spending four to …

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 …

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 3rd December 2022. So these days Monchique is hosting a walking festival. In the run-up to the event, a lavish publicity campaign was already announcing, in several languages “hikes along the waterways, workshops, shows and talks”. This all sounds like relaxation, harmony, tourism in touch with nature. By the looks of it, a major event with plenty of foreign visitors might be in store. I’m one of those foreign visitors. I’ve been coming here for years, and have friends here that I like to visit. If it wasn’t for them I would probably choose different destinations – because I …

Saturday 19th November 2022. “We can say that we have achieved a great deal, but we have had to adapt” to many new challenges, said the Mayor of São Brás de Alportel, Vítor Guerreiro, at the press conference held at the Hotel Rural/Restaurante Rocha da Gralheira on Thursday 10 November. Elected to serve from 2021 to 2025, the municipal executive told the 30 journalists present about the main achievements and challenges that the Council had encountered during its first year of office. It was a year marked by the global crisis caused by the war between Russia and Ukraine, the …

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 …

Saturday the 1st of October 2022. Forests store CO2, forests store water, forests keep cities cool, forests ease droughts, forests protect against erosion. This is a list that could go on and on, at leisure. A forest that is properly protected is an investment in the future. By 2030 the EU wants to see at least three billion trees planted. That’s not bad. However, you can plant a lot of trees in eight years, but not a forest, right? Unless we were to plant a large number of Miyawaki forests. What are they? And how do they work? Akira Miyawaki, a …