Either Portugal’s population continues drifting towards the coast, settling around Porto, Lisbon, Aveiro and other urban centres, effectively abandoning the country’s interior, or the nation must openly overhaul its forest policy to reduce the number of wildfires and the scale of land burned, opines Nuno de Santos Loureiro, a university professor and specialist in Geographic Information Systems, whose research has long focused on land management and wildfire monitoring.
He argues that confronting what he describes as the “enormous problem” of inland abandonment, closely linked to the rise in burned areas in recent years, must become a “national mission”.
The University of Algarve academic is widely regarded as one of the country’s leading authorities on the subject. For years, he has relied on what he calls “Europe’s eyes in the sky”, the satellites of the Copernicus programme, to study changes in land occupation and the multifaceted impacts of wildfires.
Over time, Dr. Loureiro has become an outspoken critic of what he sees as persistent mistakes in territorial planning and forest management.
Yet despite the growing body of scientific knowledge and rapid technological progress, Portugal in the 21st century faces far more fires, and far more destructive ones, than it did in the previous century.
“There is a combination of factors,” Loureiro said in an interview with local newspaper Sul Informação. “Technological progress has left technicians increasingly enthusiastic inside offices and in front of computers. Everyone gets excited about software, hardware, satellite imagery, all this technological paraphernalia and expertise. Now it’s artificial intelligence, tomorrow it will be something else. But they are increasingly confined to offices, increasingly distant from the places that are actually burning.”
“Field technicians have disappeared. What burns is the countryside, not computers. Trees burn, not office desks. There is an enormous gap between know-how and the reality on the ground,” he added.
Alongside this technological shift lies another structural change: rural abandonment. “The abandonment began in the 1960s and intensified throughout the 1970s and 1980s. The people who lived in the countryside were the day-to-day managers of the land. They carried out controlled burns, managed pastures, they were, in practice, the custodians of the territory.”
These communities, he explained, knew how to use fire responsibly because they depended on it to maintain grazing land and livestock. “Those people emigrated, aged, and disappeared.”
Loureiro goes further, criticising what he calls Portugal’s “afforestation paranoia”.
“We created the utopian idea that a healthy, balanced landscape must be densely forested. Everything must have trees. Everything must be planted.” In the past, he argues, fires were far less frequent because forest rangers, farmers, and shepherds maintained the land, and because there were fewer trees.
“It’s very simple: on one hand we lost people on the ground; on the other, forest area multiplied several times over.” Much of that expansion consists of maritime pine and eucalyptus plantations. Economic incentives linked to the pulp, paper and timber industries played a role, alongside what he describes as an obsession with total forest cover as a symbol of environmental conservation.
Political decisions reinforced this shift. Among them was the dismantling of Portugal’s forest ranger service, a move many experts describe as self-sabotage. João Guerreiro, former rector of the University of Algarve and head of the Independent Technical Commission that investigated the deadly 2017 fires, labelling it a “grave mistake”.
Fernando Santos Pessoa, founder and first director of the National Service for Parks, Reserves and Landscape Heritage, the precursor to today’s Institute for Nature Conservation and Forests, identifies two additional “major errors”: the abolition of river wardens and road maintenance workers.
The latter once regularly cleared roadside embankments, but selectively. “Clearing does not mean stripping everything bare,” he said. “Today some companies arrive occasionally and simply flatten everything. Embankments should retain appropriate vegetation, that’s what these workers ensured.” River wardens, he added, were equally vital.
“Have you seen how fire behaves along streams? Our waterways are seasonal and often filled with dense vegetation and reeds that burn intensely. When fire reaches them, they act like a fuse carried by the wind.”
Today, he notes, no one maintains these areas or enforces landowners’ obligations to clear vegetation along watercourses.
The abolition of forest rangers was another critical mistake. Portugal, he argues, may be unique in maintaining more than 30% forest cover while dismantling the permanent network of professionals stationed year-round in mountainous areas.
“At the slightest column of smoke there was always a ranger nearby who spotted it immediately and intervened. Fires died there and then. Without that presence, many fires are only detected once they are already uncontrollable.”
Forest rangers were not primarily police officers, despite being armed. They were highly trained technical specialists with deep knowledge of the terrain.
“The masters were the men of the mountains , they knew more than many engineers. When I arrived in my twenties, it was those masters who saved me, because they knew every inch of the landscape. All of that disappeared, to nobody’s benefit,” he recalled.
Returning to Dr Loureiro, for him, the fundamental question becomes unavoidable: is Portugal truly a continental territory of 90,000 square kilometres, or merely a narrow coastal strip with scattered inland satellites? “The problem will not be solved in one or two years. It will not be solved within a single political term. It may take two legislatures to genuinely transform the landscape.”
Such a transformation raises difficult questions still lacking clear answers. “How do we rethink the territory? How do we bring people back? How do we rebuild agriculture, crops, vineyards, almonds, apples? Nobody really knows.”
“That is why we must recognise this as a truth and as an enormous problem. It is unquestionably a national mission, because we face human challenges, territorial challenges and political challenges.”
Without people returning to the interior, without a different approach to land management, and without technology being placed at the service of protecting forests, and the wider territory, from fire, these specialists warn that wildfires will continue to dominate headlines throughout Portugal’s hot season, year after year, consuming hectare after hectare.
Source material: Sul Informação, Hugo Rodrigues
