Former Albufeira mayor Desidério Silva elevated to chair National Association of Tourism

The head of the Algarve Tourism Board, the former Albufeira mayor Desidério Silva has been appointed as the president of the National Association of Tourism.

Silva was elected by unanimous vote to chair the board of the National Association of Tourism - it is not known who else was on the list of candidates.

A positive way of looking at this appointment is that Silva is from the Algarve, has run the Algarve Tourism Board for several years and therefore will take an Algarve focused view of tourism in Portugal as a whole.

Desidério Silva is only the second president in the history of the National Association of Tourism and succeeds Pedro Machado who is the head of the Regional Tourism Organisation for Central Portugal.

The National Association of Tourism  was established in November 2013 with the involvement of the Tourism Boards covering the Algarve, Alentejo, Central Portugal, Oporto, the North of Portugal and the Regional Directorate of Tourism in Madeira.

There are 21 members from different parts of the tourism industry with regional, national and international expertise.

Vítor Neto, a former Secretary of State for Tourism and current president of the Business Association of the Algarve Region (NERA), believes that "the candidacy of Desiderio Silva is positive because it allows us to state the weight of the Algarve at national level. The region is often overlooked and politically marginalised."

Silva's free-spending ways when runnning Albufeira council now are but a distant memory as he climbs the ladder of patronage and favours to run the country's major tourism body, refusing still to comment on his disastrous civil engineering project that failed to protect the centre of Albufeira from severe flooding in November 2015.

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