Short Stories

Saturday 2nd October 2021. Climate change. Climate neutral in ten steps? But of course. All we have to do is prepare for it. Every one of us. Whether we’ve learned this or not. Me for instance, my whole long life I’ve grown up with the concept of carrying my trash out to the bin once a week, for the binmen to come and collect it every Thursday. At some stage the concept of waste separation won the day: glass with glass, plastics with plastics, paper with paper, and so on. So I’d place the packaging material into the dedicated waste …

Saturday 2nd October 2021. It all started in June 1991. At that time it lasted for ten days, in 2003 too; in 2004 then five days, and the same in 2016. In 2018 then it went on for seven days. On those days the woods of the Monchique mountains were ablaze, well, whatever remained after each new fire, and every time we were left with a little less forest. During the last blaze the fire destroyed 28,000 hectares, and in 2003 a whopping 43,000 hectares of forest. But what that means you cannot really express by crunching a few numbers. …

Saturday 25th September 2021. About three years ago, a Portuguese journalist asked me to appear on her television program, Guided Tour (Visita Guiada in Portuguese), which aims at introducing viewers to destinations of historical and cultural interest in the country. She wanted to interview me inside St. Dominic’s Church in Lisbon because it was there that the anti-Semitic pogrom began in 1506 that I describe in my bestselling novel The Last Kabbalist of Lisbon.  During the pogrom, which lasted for three days, some 2,000 New Christians – Jews forcibly converted to Christianity nine years earlier – were murdered and burnt …

Saturday 18th September 2021. By now every serious democratic candidate has been given the chance to air their views on the forest fires in a 30-minute unscripted interview. Their replies to the question of what they are intending to do to break the cycle of forest fires in Monchique, or to stop them altogether, makes it look as if they didn’t really have a solution in mind. José Chaparro, Bruno Estremores, João Duarte and Paulo Alves are the four candidates who all want to become mayor, and all of them still have a real chance to make this happen. Unless …

Saturday 11th September 2021. It was in the wake of the major forest fire in September 2003 that I first launched an appeal in the newspaper I was running at the time to help the victims and initiate a reforestation project in Monchique. I visited the new owners of an area called Covão de Águia, who had bought those woodlands, spanning over 60 hectares and including houses and ruins on 5 September 2003 at the notary’s office, with no inkling that their land might burn just one week later. It was a miracle that the house itself hadn’t burnt down …

Saturday 4th September 2021 Modern life has caught up with Monchique too, a little while ago already actually. However, the old traditional life remains alive on the Monchique mountains, at an altitude of 500 metres above sea level. The novelties came creeping up the hills and mountains over the past decades, on their way from Portimão and Lisbon, but also with tourism from abroad. According to the tourism authority, the mountain summit of Foía, with an elevation of 902 metres, is the second-most visited spot in the Algarve. The best example for Modern Life is fashion and its sometimes erratic …

Saturday the 28th of August 2021 Not a single woman candidate in sight. Really, is it only men on these election posters? Over half of humanity isn’t standing in this election. This is just not on. I am observing the local elections with the eyes of a journalist, a foreigner from a EU country, not in Afghanistan, no, in Portugal. And what is being offered to me, dear Politics, in Monchique and many other communities across the country, is not the representative choice of female candidates I’d like to see. On top of that we have that guy from our …

Saturday 21st August 2021 when what we urgently need is peace. Last Sunday there was a fire not even a kilometre away from our Botanical Garden project in Caldas de Monchique. Someone had deliberately or negligently thrown something inflammable out of a car window. A cigarette, a glass bottle? Who knows? The helicopters are flying attacks on the fire just like in a real war. They are throwing water-filled bombs onto the flames, flying one sortie after the other. It’s like a film about Vietnam. They need two hours, aided by ground troops, to win the battle with the enemy. …

Saturday 14th August 2021 We should, all of us, try and bring ecology and economy together in a practical way, make peace. As awful as forest fires are, on a second glance, once the shock and trauma subside, they do provide a huge chance. Planting slow-growing mixed forests from scratch takes time, yet is eminently important. Many of the forests that fell victim to the heat and forest fires of the past few years had their roots in an era where the forest only served as a quick self-service for business. This is starting to change as we speak, whether …