It’s the foaling season in Faia Brava, Portugal’s premier rewilding reserve and oldest privately owned protected area. The stallion stands protectively between our vehicle and the herd’s newborn ponies and pregnant mares. Above us a griffon vulture is making languid forays from the granite cliffs that soar out of the Coa river, even though it’s too early in the year for the thermal currents that keep it airborne during long searches for prey. While we don’t see them, Eduardo Alves, a biologist and Faia Brava’s bird expert, says that the cliffs also provide refuge to Bonelli’s eagles.
What these animals have in common — along with maronesa cows, roe deer and red deer, and many others — is that the Greater Coa Valley is providing them with shelter as part of a bold project to create a rewilding corridor of 463 sq miles.
The valley lies adjacent to Spain in the northwest of the Iberian peninsula, where the problem of human depopulation from rural areas is common to both sides of the border. While in Spain the political imperative to address this has led to the creation of a Ministry of Ecological Transition and Demographic Challenge, in Portugal the fight to revive the countryside is under way at its grassroots. ATNatureza, a private non-profit organization that manages Faia Brava, is working to reverse rural decline by promoting nature conservation through rewilding measures.
The Greater Coa Valley, encompassing 1,158 sq miles of meadows, forest and mountains, has suffered from decades of neglect and land abandonment. Between 2011 and 2014, when Portugal was one of the European Union nations to undergo a painful international bailout during its debt crisis, some 50,000 people a year left the country and official unemployment reached 17.6 per cent, with more than 40 per cent of people under 25 out of work.
The recession sped up the exodus of agricultural workers, leaving large tracts of pastureland untended. Today the evidence of that retreat is abundant; groves of almond and olive trees left unharvested, scrub taking over previously cultivated meadows.
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As the population declines and ages — three quarters of northern Portugal’s farms are managed by people over 55 — an air of despair hangs over sparsely populated villages. “People here feel abandoned,” says Ines Bom, a biologist working at Faia Brava.
“But the situation isn’t hopeless. I am not from here, but I have learnt everything I know from them and they in turn appreciate us being here and our work — they see that young people are interested in the opportunities for restoring nature. Mindsets are changing, you can feel it and experience it over time — the idea that this can be a natural territory and attract people from outside is giving hope and belief back.”
Cave paintings in northern Portugal provide evidence of the ancient lineage of the garrano horse, numbers of which have declined so dramatically since its days as a pack and work animal that it has been given protected status. Its contribution to Faia Brava comes from its grazing, which helps maintain pastures and glades by controlling the growth of saplings. In this way, the reserve’s 40 garranos reduce the risk of wildfire. It has not suffered a fire since 2014. With the advance of climate change, fires have become one of Portugal’s greatest threats. A total of 106 lives were lost to these fires in 2017. Wildfire-prone conditions have multiplied across Portugal’s interior.
More than 20 per cent of the Greater Coa Valley has burnt in the last decade. In the middle of the last century the government invested heavily to stimulate the timber industry by planting more than 1,158 sq miles of non-indigenous pine and eucalyptus — both highly prone to burning.
While the plantations increased the risk of fires, they also disenfranchised pastoralists by reducing grazing land and domestic herbivores. Over time their seeds spread trees into adjacent land, extending the mass of fire-prone vegetation over greater areas.
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But rewilding projects are mapping an alternative route to a sustainable future. Faia Brava is the keystone in a plan to create a wildlife corridor along the Coa Valley, connecting the Douro Valley in the north with the Malcata mountain range in the south. It is collaborating with other groups including Zoo Logical, the University of Aveiro and Rewilding Europe, using private money and public funding from the Endangered Landscapes Programme.
With marginal and abandoned land continuing to be acquired — and more land in private hands being managed by rewilders — the ecosystem is being rebuilt with controlled releases of wild and semi-wild herbivores. These include another endangered horse breed, the sorraia, as well as taurus cattle, bred to resemble the extinct auroch.
The return of wildlife also helps to promote the area’s economy by attracting nature tourism. Pre-Covid, Faia Brava was hosting up to a thousand visitors a year, in controlled conditions to protect its growing biodiversity.
For now Bom is worried by the lack of rainfall in a drought that began last October. This will have consequences for reforestation plans to plant a further 8,000 cork and oak trees this year. “It may be that only half of them survive, but even that will contribute,” she says, drawing our attention to the bare, steep rocky banks on the eastern side of the river, contrasted with the more densely wooded west bank.
As we finish our visit to the reserve, we halt in the village of Algodres, where storks once more nest atop the church thanks to work conducted by Faia Brava on its steeple. Bom and Alves are warmly greeted in a bar and the owner refuses payment for our coffees. It’s a small token of generosity that hints at a deepening respect for these young pioneers who are bringing life back to the valley.
