Luz, Ana Luísa

Until mid-last century, extensive farming systems in Portuguese mountainous areas relied on common land, the baldios, mostly used for grazing and for gathering livelihoods. These resources were used and managed jointly by the villagers, according to locally created institutions. In the following years, several socioeconomic and political events contributed to the gradual distancing of people from their lands. For instances, the cattle and the woods were replaced by monocultures of pine trees, as part of a national project that aimed to turn baldios into productive territories for the whole nation. As an alternative to the harsh life conditions, from the 1960’s on, people fled from rural areas to the cities and abroad.
In 1974, with democracy reinstated, baldios were formally returned to the peoples, within a legal framework, revised last time in 2017. That year was also marked by the occurrence of the most destructive rural fires ever registered in Portugal. Following the catastrophe, public institutions lost credibility in the forest matters and conditions were gathered for a paradigm shift. In this context, in 2019 the Government launched a pilot-project aiming to group baldios and encourage cooperation between scarcely populated communities and thus boost local forest management.
So far 19 groups of baldios were created and a second project round aims to create 10 more. We look at the process of grouping baldios by focusing on two cases, one in the centre, where fire destroyed part of the forest, and the other in the north. Differences in the starting conditions of each group led to completely different outputs and perspectives, highlighting the gap between centrally designed public policies and its adequacy to territorial conditions. We conclude that despite depopulation, there is ground for baldios’ local management, however diversity among the baldios needs to be considered and allowed when policy is put into practice.