[00:00:00] Speaker A: Have you noticed how much traction the rewilding movement has gained in recent years?
What used to be an unfamiliar term, rewilding, is growing into a global phenomenon, and it has certainly taken over the European continent for the better.
Welcome back, friends, to Rewildology, the nature podcast that explores the human side of conservation, travel, and rewilding the planet. I'm your host, Brooke Mitchell, conservation biologist and adventure traveler.
Today, you and I are going to have a masterclass on the concept of rewilding with Pedro Prada, the man who is leading the charge in Portugal. As the team leader of rewilding Portugal, pedro is at the forefront of restoring landscapes, protecting wildlife, and combating the top threats to Portugal's wildlands, particularly in the Koa Valley. In this episode, we'll journey through Pedro's experiences from the early days of his connection with nature to the innovative work he's leading today. We'll uncover the challenges and triumphs of rewilding in Portugal and delve into topics like carnival restoration. You know, one of my favorites of all time, water conservation and the integration of nature tourism into the Koa Valley. So whether you're a seasoned conservationist or simply someone who loves the outdoors, get ready to be inspired and informed. Join me as I explore the wild side of Portugal in the incredible story of Pedro Prada, a man dedicated to the preservation of our planet's natural wonders.
Well. Hi, Pedro. Thank you so much for sitting down with me on the other side of the world. I'm always so happy to tune in with people from everywhere across the globe, and you are representing a new country for the show, which is even more exciting. So before we get to the amazing work that you have been pioneering and leading the charge on, could you tell me about the early days? What inspired you to take a path into conservation and restoration work?
[00:02:26] Speaker B: Yeah, well, thanks for inviting me. It's great to be here. Fan of the podcast, so it's a real pleasure to share also my experience and my knowledge around this landscape. Portugal, it's not such a well known country around the world, small country in Europe at the edge of Iberia. So it's interesting for all those reasons, too. I grew up close to the mountains, the highest mountains in the country, in a farm setting, so I live in the countryside, and I grew up surrounded by nature.
The natural world always interested me. In my early days, as a kid, I used to watch all these nature and wildlife documentaries. So all of those influences I grew up with, and as it matured and developed, during my growing up, I became more and more interested in biology, and I went to college to learn about it, to train myself as a biologist.
And my early interest in biology was actually evolution, the process of evolution. It's fascinating, and that's what sparked my imagination back in the days of college, and I've researched and trained mostly in evolution related matters all the way to my first master's program that was Ecology and evolution. And by doing once you got into the job of researching evolution at the same time that was combined with a significant part of ecology research put together, I kind of realized that the fundamental idea on what evolution is is quite interesting. But for human experience on this planet it's quite limited to actually do something about it, actually can't do anything about it's just a process that goes and it's marvelous to see it happening and it's marvelous to know the history of the planet and its life forms but there's really very little you can have to it. So on the same time as I was doing that, my research also touched the ecology part which is a different process, it's a more immediate process. It's a process that you can actually see developed before your eyes and you can interact to improve it. And I started to realize that that could be one of my dedication as a human being on this planet is to learn more about this process and how to help it to restore and to go further on top of that, I've decided to take a second master. And the second master was conservation biology, just because the experience that I had lead me to that. So I was researching coral reef recovery both on the ecological recovery and the evolution impact of that recovery. And what I realized during my research is that on evolution impact of that specific group of beings of life forms, there's pretty nothing else changing. But at the ecology level it's pretty impressive how it was recovering from a natural phenomena that led to its destruction and recolonization of a whole reef. And that was really interesting, even if more compared when people are a variable in that equation too. So if people do some activities they will amper this recovery but if they do a different kind, they can help it to restore. And that for me was a defining moment where I realized that it's a choice of how people interact with nature that can lead to helping the development of recovery or actually destruction. So having that in mind, I start to get more and more interested about it. As I said, I did a second master on conservation biology but I was also involved in many different projects around the world that were dealing with restoration of different habitats from the Amazon to the Northwest Pacific in the US.
Caribbean and many different habitats and biomes around the Americas. I was involved in the actual practice of restoration and that was the early days of my career as a conservation biologist.
[00:06:59] Speaker A: And what are some of those things that you learned going abroad? What were, I guess, some of the big takeaways that you had in all of these different restoration projects? I mean, wow, the Caribbean, the Northwest, like you were everywhere. What are some of the big things that you learned, that you brought back with you.
[00:07:19] Speaker B: So one of the things that impacted me the most is the different perception that we have from Europe regarding what nature restoration is. So I had a classical training on nature restoration and Europe is a very old country, so it has these old ideas and it takes a long time to change those ideas. And restoration, conservation, wildlife protection was always seemed the same way. People have to do everything to make sure that the species or habitats are stable and don't change. And that's the main classical idea which for me was impactful to see in the Americas and the New World how this is not applied as such. There so space for nature, time for nature, evolving processes, catastrophes and dynamic of those events are accepted and are part of the restoration strategy. And that to me was quite disrupting to the way things were being done here in Europe regarding nature conservation. So I started to realize that there is a different way to do things which to me personally felt more natural, more organic, more it's like something that I always felt but I wasn't aware of. So having that realization was kind of a change of mindset towards what I could do. And I was thinking back home, what is it possible to do back home in Europe, in Portugal, in the central mountains and the canyons that surround the central mountains, here where I grew up, that could be applied to let nature thrive. And the idea of Rewilding, of let nature thrive, started to be a concept that I was looking for. But it wasn't yet assumed in Europe that kind of strategy, that kind of conceptualization of what nature restoration could be. So as I came back, I started to develop ideas on how to do that.
I joined as an employee to a company that has as a business model to transform old forest plantations into native forests. I worked there for a year. That gave me a good insight of what could be done in those kind of situations. At the same time, I started a company with a friend on habitat restoration and we were doing small habitat restoration projects for privates or municipalities. And they were all very limited in a way because of the scope, size and goals were small. And in the meantime, there was this upcoming of Rewilding as an idea in Europe by the hand of Rewilding Europe, who had set out a call for landscapes around Europe to apply as a pilot, as pilots of Rewilding within the European continent. And one of those early pilot areas, Landscapes, was just next door to where I was living. And as they were selected as one of the first five pilot areas for Rewilding Europe, they opened a call for team leader for the Rewilding project and also managing director for the organization to which I've applied. And I was selected. So, back in 2014, almost ten years ago, I started my job at that organization as team leader for the Rewilding landscape of the western Niberia area, which was a poorly defined area, but the concept was there. And as I joined, that was my task, to define that specific work, what is the strategy, how to achieve it, how to set goals and steps towards it, and to define it as a project, as an initiative for the future. And since then, that's what I've been doing for the past ten years, first in that one NGO, and now in Rewilding, Portugal, as a leading partner of the partnership that leads this now greater Cua Valley. Rewilding area.
[00:11:38] Speaker A: Yes, let's get into that. Let's talk about rewilding Portugal. So you gave great history on the project and how it came to so, and you mentioned the COA Valley. So what are the main projects that you're focused on? I know there's a lot, so maybe give us the top level, what are they? And then let's start diving into each of them and piecing them together and how they all come as to one thing of free world in Portugal.
[00:12:07] Speaker B: Yeah, no, definitely. It's a lot of layers.
I prefer to call it layers towards the same goal. Of course, first we have to define what is the Greater Goa Valley. It's simple, it's the catchment of the Goa River, so that means all the extension of the river plus its tributaries and all the land that basically compose the basin, the catchment of the Goa River. And this is quite big. I'll use actors as a measure. It's 320,000 hectare, big catchment. It's basically the region in between guard the central mountain, the central mountain system in Portugal, towards the border with Spain. It's basically that all region. So everything that rains past the central mountains will drain through the Koa into the Doro, which is the main river, where the Koa is a tributary. So all of that area has a very regional history, first human history, and it has been marked as a passage, mostly an area where humans and its activities have passed through. So the settlements here are more, if you look back in history on a grand perspective, more or less unstable, so they pop up and then they disappeared. And so people staying and doing their activities, it's like it's a boom and bust. So it starts and goes away. And that led always this region as more or less wild region, because every time there is a spike in human activity, nature and processes are driven away or become suppressed at some point. But then every time it goes down, they all come back immediately. And we're now, at this stage, honestly, if you look back at the social, economic history of the region for the past century, we're now in this decline slope of human activity and its impact on wildlife and what's happening in nature and wildlife is coming back. And so that was the context where we're setting up to promote this wildlife comeback, this rewilding of the landscape to happen in the Greater Koa Valley. And to achieve so regarding the conditions that we have, we have to have a strategy. And basically that strategy has to touch a lot of different layers. So these layers are both, of course, ecology, wildlife, nature and natural processes, but also people, sociology, economy.
Where are the ups and downs, the strengths and the weaknesses of this economy in such a region, and also the cultural aspect of the landscape. So these are many different things going on regarding each of the layers. I think we can go through a few of them. And what we're trying to do, basically, is to make sure that this grand region is suitable for wildlife to move through. Again, the idea of flowing and the passage and the migration is very key for what we do in the COA, just because that's been what the COA stands for in thousands of years. So if you look back what happened here to all the changes in this landscape, it always has to do something with coming and going, passing through, moving, migrating, both human and wildlife. So what we want to do is to create a corridor for wildlife that connects a lot of different nature protected areas with different habitats and different wildlife populations to move through and to be connected and to allow that to make sure that nature values thrive because of that. So how to do that, that's another question. I used to summarize, that we try to take advantage of the opportunities there are, while at the same time we try to withhold and reduce some of the threats. So if you work on maximizing the opportunity while reducing the threat, that's where we change the balance towards allowing nature to come back. And that's the basis of the rewilding strategy for the Greater Koa Valley.
[00:16:40] Speaker A: Oh, so cool. And for context, is the Koha Valley determined as one of the top priority nature for I unfortunately, have never traveled to Portugal, so I guess, just from my understanding, why was the COA Valley specifically chosen? You said that you did mention all of these important historical reasons, and it is a great corridor, but is there another area in Portugal that also was a top candidate? Or was this determined to be the most important that needed rewilded first and then you could start moving into the other areas?
[00:17:22] Speaker B: If you think about it from a distance perspective, that wouldn't be the top priority because first, it's a very not so known region of the country. Even for the people of the country, it wouldn't be on the top priorities for tourists. It isn't either internal or international. It wasn't classified as a natural area. Most of the knowledge they know about the Kuwa Valley is about the Paleolithic engravings. So besides being one part an important part, a significant part of the history of this place is not the whole region. And so knowledge about the region classification or protection of the region and even the opportunity to do something was not on the top priorities. But if you sum everything together and you kind of connect the dots of what it is, opportunities, time, space, and the chances of making something really relevant, I think you should sum all this together. The covalidance stands out clearly. Portia has this long history depicted on engravings that show fauna megafauna that moved through this place. It has been through centuries, through the Middle Ages, a war zone between Portugal and Spain. So the density of population and activities was quite low for centuries because the two countries were disputing it. And it has been changing hands several times during the Middle Ages. Then when it was finally settled as a border, the landscape itself, in terms of climate conditions, soil fertility and precipitation, it's so low that, honestly, as a development basis for agriculture or other kind of development has been impaired because of that.
These are marginal lands. It's a huge, big area of marginal land, only very few pockets at its edge, both south or north, that has a little bit of interest on the farming development perspective. But as a whole, it's limited. And at the same time, because of the social dynamic of the past few decades, it has been reducing the density of population quite significantly. Its activity as well, and nature came back has been evident, even though there was not much information about it as because it wasn't classified, it was not a priority, it wasn't monitored enough to know that the wildlife is actually coming back here for decades now. So all of that together make it a really good opportunity to showcase what rewilding can be. And that's the difference that rewilding has set up to do. It's not about talking about the big national parks and the most known wilderness areas. No. It's about taking whatever is available and make it better for wildlife, for nature to come back, for people who appreciate nature to be able to see change happening, to come and visit, to know. So all of that was in the greater Koa Valley at the potential level, but it wasn't really worked on to be a destination for nature, for culture and all alike put together. And that's something that we set out to do, to combine all of these strengths and make sure that the weaknesses and the threats were at least reduced away so that nature can come back and rewilding happens.
[00:20:59] Speaker A: That makes total sense. Okay, so it almost seems the word that kept coming into my mind as you were talking, it almost is like a pilot project of what can be done. Like, if we put all the resources, we have a great strategy, look what we can do, especially with all of these different factors which we'll start to get into now when you start to consider them? Yeah, because if anything, it's almost easier when you are restoring or rewilding a national park or something like that. A lot of the factors that you are currently encountering don't exist because people have already been moved out. Wildlife probably is already thriving there. There's probably already been research done. So, yeah, if anything, you have a much harder project which could lead to much bigger outcomes for the long term. So let's get into that. You mentioned that one of your goals is to change the balance on the threats and the possible good outcomes that could come of that. So what are the top threats? What is the Koa Valley or maybe, in general, portugal's wild natural areas are facing?
[00:22:05] Speaker B: Yeah. So one of the biggest threats that Portugal being worldwide known about it is the fire. Fire frequency and fire intensity. So fire is a natural phenomenon, no doubt about that. It's something that ecosystems evolve with. They know how to handle it, they know how to respond. They even have strategies that benefit from the fact that fire happened. That's fine. And all of this landscape clearly has been adapted and evolved with the presence of fire, but it has never faced a frequency and intensity of fire as we're now witnessing for the past four decades at least. So what happens there's? Way too high, unnatural frequency of ignition. So starting a fire happen too frequently. And these are mostly 90 something percent human caused, according to official statistics. 50% accidental, but 50% intentional.
So that's a huge pressure on these ecosystems to constantly being recovering from damage caused by fire. So the frequency is way too high, and then the intensity, because natural fires usually occur in a specific season, and that's the storm rolling season, when the storms rolling from the Atlantic and they come bursting with lightning through the landscape, the first few actually start natural fires, and that's fine. But that happens after summer, early fall, first rain seasons. So the impact of the intensity is much lower than what we're witnessing here at the beginning and peak of summer, having a huge frequency of ignitions, and that starts fires. That when they spread, they are uncontrollable, and their intensity is a nightmare. It is impossible to deal with it. It just squash everything through its passage.
This is a big threat. So one of our strategies is to reduce that threat by reduce the number of ignitions and reduce the intensity of which the ignitions might happen to achieve. So how we do that, we do that on a very active way and a more passive way in parallel. So we have vigilance teams or rangers that have an year round activity. And then during summer, most of their dedication is actually on fire vigilance. So they set out to do vigilance of the landscape at specific periods of the day and specific periods over the summer. Where the peak of frequencies happened. So they are setting out their eyes and then they cooperated with huge extended network of people who are either volunteering to help in the vigilance or are people in the local communities, villages and towns that have information are in straight contact with these Rangers to give early warnings and then they are in contact directly with the official firefighting capabilities. So firefighters and civil protection and the police are in direct contact with our rangers. So these rangers are kind of pivotal hubs of information for early warnings and the passage of these early warnings to the official combat forces. And then at ground level, whenever there is an event, these rangers has been the year round traveling through the landscape. They know a lot about that landscape. So they know all the tracks, the dirt tracks, all the accesses, all the water points, everything that you need to know when you're facing combat. And sometimes it is clear that the firefighters or the civil protection, they don't have that information. So having these rangers on site to help them to access, to get to a water point, to turn back if needed quickly and to escape is crucial for the combat forces to happen. But I always say this, our vigilance team is designed to fail only because in Portugal, the only news that happens is when everything is burning. So if we avoid that, we won't be news anywhere. But the impact of their work is great because what they're doing is to avoid this summer seasonal news of desperation in front of the fire with people running and houses being burned. That's what's sensational. What we're trying to do is to avoid that sensational by making sure that doesn't happen. And when it does happen, we have the capability to help to reduce the expansion and intensity of the fire. So that's one very active way to reduce it. On the other hand, the remaining time of the year, what we are trying to promote is that natural processes actually act as a resilience force to avoid the damage caused by intense fires. And that happens by processes that are natural, happening in unnatural ways, which are mostly grazing. So grazers and browsers, especially the big ones, heavy body grazers, what do they do is they consume the fine matter. So the biomass that grows in spring, so the grasses and new shoots of trees and shrubs that are very palatable, those are the ones that they eat. So they reduce that biomass by consuming that biomass, transforming it into ready made carbon to be absorbed by soil through their scats. And while doing that, every hour during the whole year, we're reducing the accumulation of fuel in the landscape.
On a case of having a fire that's not available to burn. So that reduces the intensity. So combining the two approaches, we're trying to reduce the threat of fire as a whole by reducing the frequency of fire with active vigilance and helping the combat forces and at the same time reducing the fuel that accumulates through the consumption of biomass, through the natural processes, which are the large grazers. And we're doing that by rewilding domestic animals. So we brought what used to be a domestic breed of horse, portuguese breed of horse, that has a lot of primitive traits, back into the in a wild status, so to allow it to be free and to act as a grazer. And the same time we do the same with cattle. So we brought this newly developed breed, the Taurus, to replace the role of the arok. So we brought these two. But we need more, we need more, we need the species of the year, the IVACs, the beaver and the high numbers of rabbit in big numbers of rabbit is a big grazer as well. And we need to increase that bioabundance so that the abundance of grazers in numbers that are capable of consuming the biomass in order to reduce the risk of accumulating fuel for a future event of fire. So that's something that we're working on. We started with horses and the towers, which are easier. We're trying to improve the condition so that beer can come back and increase their numbers. We've been asking for a long time to allow us to reintroduce the IBEX and the beaver and we're forcing that because it's by joining all these elements back into a complete ecosystem that will allow for the processes that these animals play in the ecosystem to have results. And this is only needed to be done now because for the past two or three centuries, what we have is this landscape being grazed to the bone by domestic animals. And as these have been decreasing steadily over the past few decades, they haven't been replaced by the same kind of process by wild herbivores. And that's what we're doing on a more passive way to address the fire as a threat.
[00:30:37] Speaker A: Wow, I have so many questions. I want to stick first though, on the native species part. So would it be possible for the natural grazers to come back on their own through corridors or do you think it's going to require human intervention to bring the species back? And if so, where do you source those animals? Are they bred in captivity or would they come from like a national park or how would that work? And is there a timeline when you think that maybe in the next five years we have to have IBEX back? Or is that too we're not even close to that.
[00:31:21] Speaker B: Yeah, so many different answers to that because honestly, we have to look at each in specific. So grazers as wild horses or aurogs, they won't come back. They were extinct, so they are never coming back. We don't have that. We can't source them back, basically. So for that we use proxies and the proxies that we've been using is this suraya the old primitive breed of horses, and the Taurus, the new replacement for Aralds. That's done, we're starting it. We have a few herds now, so what we want to do is now enlarge their range to allow them to actually cover more land and increase their numbers so that's one on another, some that are not extinct that might come back, such as deer, row deer and red deer, and even follow deer. They are close by or in very low numbers. So what we need to do is to actually work on the connectivity of small corridor where these animals can reach new areas and thrive. There's plenty of habitat, but there's not sometimes the necessary connectivity, fine connectivity to allow these deer species to come back, but they have been coming back. So road deer has grown in numbers. We're witnessing this red deer finally has reached the greater Kua Valley area, and more and more we are witnessing their comeback. So what we need to make sure now is that these first few pioneers into the landscape have the chance to breathe and to thrive and grow in numbers. So that's another one. But there are some species that you can't do much besides actually actively bringing them back. And that's the case for iVEX and that's the case for beaver. And these two will have to be brought back. And we've been trying to having the licensing, the permitting and all the process cleared up to be able to bring those back.
If you ask me what time it will take to make sure that we'll be back. So for the beaver, I'm pretty keen to see the expansion of the more close by population at the edge of the border between Portugal and Spain, that is not too far from the COA. In the next 510 years, it will be reaching this and it will come back. So naturally from existing population, it will expand and probably start to colonize the area of the COA River and tributary. So that may be and for the mean, we're going to be very persistent and we're going to pressure to allow the return of Ives to this landscape. And we will have to source it from existing populations in Iberia, both in Portugal and Spain, their existing population with good numbers, where we could source some of the animals and bring back. So it's a matter of the national authorities allow us to have the permit to do so. And we want to do it on a controlled and clear way so that go through all the steps needed for a reintroduction.
And we've done that work already at some extent. And I think for that reason, I think it's possible in the next five years, let's say, hopefully we will have the permit to bring the first back.
[00:34:54] Speaker A: Awesome. And I'm going to come back to Beavers in a second because that's a whole other topic that's very important that I want to. Dive into. But first I would like to just chat about landscape restoration.
What about the natural vegetation? Is it the wild vegetation that it used to be? Because you said that it was grazed all the way down. And I've come to learn that it's common then for sometimes invasive species to come back in or having other issues about that.
What are you seeing? Are your natural vegetation coming back on their own or are you having to do some restoration intervention? What about that part?
[00:35:34] Speaker B: Yeah, that's super important because it always goes hand in hand. As I said, they coevolve both the forest composition and the inhabitant wildlife. Inhabitants of the forest, they coevolve together.
So it's not just bringing back the big grazers, it's also making sure that they are meeting the conditions to allow for the vegetation secession to happen. What we see here, it has been highly transformed, the whole landscape for multiple reasons. And what we see now is that wherever it's allowed, the natural vegetation comes back. So seeds aren't too far for shrub and trees to find their way in, but is limited. So we don't have the whole complete range of species that could be because some their seed sources or seed populations are too tiny and they lack some of the processes to allow them to spread. For instance, tree bearing species of trees, fruit bearing species, I mean, so trees that produce fruit, they usually need a vector to spread their seeds. If it's a small fruit, birds do that perfectly. They eat the fruit, they'll drop it somewhere, the seed will spread. But if it's a big fruit, we're talking about an apple or pear or service tree or a strawberry tree, which have like a much larger fruit, birds have a limited capacity to spread the seed. They might be eating the fruit, but they're not consuming the seed, so they are not spreading it away. So one of the things that we are doing is to allow for the natural dispersion of these seeds by the large grazers. So we're giving these fruits to the horses and to the Taurus to be digested, go through their digestive system, prepare the seeds, drop it with some nutrients on the manure and allow it to grow. And that's one and in some cases, we're even planting trees, which is sometimes not what you expect from the Rewilding initiative. But wherever there is a chance where we can set out these plantation, high density plantations of species that are missing in the diversity of the vegetation surrounding, we're creating these small woodlands with lots of different species that will attract wildlife to go there, feed on the fruits or seeds or whatever and carry them away. So that's spreading. What we're witnessing is that we are the first secessions of vegetation recovery because there has been start from ground zero, there has been a lot of fire frequency. So every time there's a fire, the secession comes back a few degrees. So what we're witnessing is that we're at the first level of secession. So the natural cover nowadays is open woodland dominated by oaks.
The more arid part, it's dominated by evergreen oaks. In the more rainy parts by Pyreneean oak, which is the typical oak from the region, or Virginia oak. So it's mostly oak species that cover land. What we're missing is that those oaks grow old, deposit a lot of soil humus that allow for other species that require more soil composition to thrive. And these are the service tree and the lime tree and the apple, pear and strawberry tree. All of that bears, fruit, bears, other type of biomes for many different biodiversity, from bacteria to invertebrates, to bird and mammal. All of that is still missing. And that's what we're pushing for. And we're pushing for in different ways, either through planting, spreading seed, giving the seed to grazers, and first of all, and most of all, allow for time for the secession to happen. That's critical. If we allowed for secession to happen, that means lower intensities of fire and lower frequencies of fire, and no harvesting or blind harvesting of firewood and clear cuts. If we allow that to happen, I'm sure with time, of course, it can be accelerated through this action, but with time, succession will happen. So it makes the forest more complex and more diverse. And that's something that we are keen to do. So a clear representation of that is going to be the expression of these fruit bearing trees, big fruit bearing trees spreading from their core areas where they are still kind of limited to into the wider region. And we're seeing that happening. So helping that to happen, but also monitoring that is happening, making sure that it's not coming back in secession once again.
[00:40:35] Speaker A: Yes. Awesome. Okay, great. That's fantastic to hear. And another layer to all of this. Like you said, it's layers. And I have another layer to ask about, and that is our apex predators. So no ecosystem can be complete if the top or apex predator, whatever you want to call it, is they are not there. They have to be there if it's to be a full circle ecosystem. So what about that? I know Iberian wolves are a thing there. I was reading all about your website, and I know we chatted last time about wolf restoration. So let's talk about that a little more in the carnivore aspect of this, I'm sure. Not just wolves. We're supposed to be on the landscape. There's always small cats and other things, maybe a jackal type species or something. So what about carnivore restoration? Is that possible yet? And if so, what have you done? Or if not, what is going to be done? And is there a timeline on that in any way?
[00:41:34] Speaker B: Yeah, completely. So we covered the cores and the connectivity, but now we need to cover carnivores because the tree C's of rewilding, it's clear that that's very important topic.
The big predators of this landscape nowadays are the Iberian wolf that is still present in very low numbers.
And the second, it's the Iberian lynx that has disappeared from the area, which was the last population in Portugal back in the 90s. So what we're doing, first on the wolf, what we're doing is to promote corridors of coexistence. So the population south of the door, the southern edge of the Iberian wolf population, is first, very highly fragmented and very low in numbers. So that means that their gene pool and diversity is decreasing. So that makes their viability as a population going down. I mean, like the viability is not achieved. So what we're doing is try to achieve the viability of population by allowing connectivity in between packs and income flux of new genes from the surrounding population. And to do so, we work both ways again. So on one way on a very active type of work is to make sure that human wildlife conflict regarding wolf is reduced. Because usually what happens is whenever there is a conflict, there will be persecution. And with persecution we lose number of individuals and losing number of individuals in such a fragmented and disconnected population, it's a big problem to address. And we're doing so by actively providing preventive measures to livestock breeders that has to leave and breathe their livestock in wolf areas, by providing guarding dogs. So the use of guarding dogs with all sorts of livestock, and that's something that we change in the perception of livestock breeders, that guarding dogs are only for small livestock such as goats and sheep. And it's not, we're now having guarding dogs with cattle, guarding dogs with donkeys, guarding dogs with horses, and that's key. And we do that by providing the animals. So the dogs that we take from guarding dog breeders from the region and that have lineages of guarding dogs that we know are good to play that role. So we take those and we offer them to livestock breeders, shepherds and livestock breeders, and we help them to include or to make sure that the inclusion of the guarding dog in the herds is made properly. And we have a veterinary team, two vets that help on that process in a period of one year, for one year, we help on that integration. And we support both all the sanitation, vaccination, everything that you have to do with a dog. So we give the dog, we do the sanitation and we make sure that we follow for one year the integration of the dog into the herds. Plus during that year we support with some food so that we reduce the cost of the integration of these dogs for these shepherds. After one year, we keep the relationship. We can't support any longer, but usually after one year, the shepherd is happy about the work of the dog and it feels a part of the family. So it's truly integrated and that's key, that's very key. It's not just about giving away dogs randomly.
The giving is actually the work done throughout that year where we constantly in contact, making sure everything is in place and that's the key. So that's one the second, we also provide with fences, both mobile or fixed fences, both iron type or like the typical fixed fences or electric. And we do that in cooperation with the livestock breeders according to their management routine. So if some fences are useful for one kind of management, others are for a different kind. So it depends really on the way the livestock manages his herds and that's also been quite successful. We have lots of people supported with those measures, both the guarding dogs and defenses. And the one thing that I think it's very clear is that for this community of livestock breeders there is a point where they can reach to ask for help. And that's been us. Mostly because their experience has been that there is a compensation system for wolf damage that is run by the state officials, but it's run so poorly that people are giving up on asking for compensation first because it's low payment, takes ages, it's very bureaucratic. Nowadays you have to go online to a portal and to fill up these forms.
Shepherd doesn't have the time for that. So it makes it so hard to actually be paid back for an attack that people are just giving up and when they give up on being reimbursed for their laws, they will take revenge. And that was when persecution happens, either through direct persecution, poisoning events, fire, whatever.
So what we're doing is to prevent that, trying to reduce the conflict, promote the coexistence because there will always be wolves in their area, there will always be a livestock. So we need to make sure that for wolves it's really difficult to prey on domestics. On the other hand, we do it a more passive approach, which is to increase the number of their wild prey. And that's another key aspect, because if we're focusing on making so hard the life of a wolf to prey on domestic, we have to allow it to find easier prey on the wild. And that's what we're keen to do. So increasing the number of road deer, allowing for the red deer to come back and increase their numbers and making sure there's enough wild boar but that they actually can feed or they have access to scavenging of whatever. It's important because these are feed sources for wolf that they will prioritize if it's easier instead of going and trying to risk their lives hunting on domestic prey. So that's both, that's the coexistence corridor strategy that we're doing to promote the wolf. We know that they are present, we know that there are few packs in the region, very unstable, very low numbers of breathing, very low success of the breathing of wolves. And we want to change that. We want to make sure that they have more food, they have less impact and conflict with livestock breeders. They find their prey and they're able to migrate and to breathe in order to improve their gene pool. So that makes sure that the viability of the whole population is increasing instead of what we've been witnessing for the past two decades, which has been a constant decline on both diversity and abundance of this top predator, which is key to keep a healthy system of grazers in check. Make them move, take out the weak, control the outbreaks of disease. And this is super important. And to make sure that if we're working on increasing grazers, we need to make sure there's a balance to it, which is the presence and effectiveness of a large predator, which is a wolf, especially a well structured and sustained wolf pack. No disturbance allowed to breathe, allowed to prey on wild prey. That's when we have packs that are strong enough to keep wild grazers in check. And that's what we want to do. And this has been the strategy. The second, and to me, it's a very dear predator, is the lynx, the Iberian lynx. So the lynx has gone through this well known historical bottleneck, where we ended up with having fewer than 190 something individuals in the whole Liberia, and it's on the brink of extinction. The last population of lynx in Portugal actually was in the upper Koa region. So in the area of the Malcata, where the spring of the Koa is, this huge hilly area. And that area, back in the late 80s, early 90s, was transformed deeply from a scrub, open woodland into an intensive forest plantation. And that destroys the habitat with it, the habitat for its prey, and also the occurrence of the first waves of disease affecting their rabbit population. By 94, the last links scat was found. And that's it, that's the last evidence that there was any links in that area. And it hasn't come back yet to settle in the greater Koa Valley. So for me, when we have clear evidence that they have back to settle in the greater Koa Valley, that's like a lifetime achievement, I would say. So, again, how to address the links? The same coexistence corridors, habitat and prey, that's simple.
That's our strategy. So nowadays we have dispersing individuals of lynx coming, passing through the Koa. Actually, the Koa, as a corridor, has been seen to be one of the corridors that the lynx move through. So the ones that been reintroduced in the south of the peninsula with trackers have moved through the corridor, through the Koa, but they haven't settled. And the reason why they haven't settled, they're mostly males looking for new breeding grounds, so they're always looking for female territories. If they can't find it, they just keep moving on. And that's what we've been witnessing in this region. So they pass they never settle. And the reason why they don't settle, these males, because they don't fight females and the females don't settle because the females are very strict about what their territory has to look like. So it has to have good abundance of their favorite prey, which is rabbit. And for a breeding female link it depends on 80% of their diet on rabbits because it's the easiest and it's the best, most cost effective energy prey when they are milking their cubs. So they need to have good densities of rabbit. And nowadays we have poor densities of rabbit everywhere because of multiple factors, we can address them later. So without the rabbit, they won't settle? Without settling, the males won't come and settle as well, so they won't know anything. So what will be doing on that? We want to make sure that there is a chance for the rabbit population to bounce back so that nowadays densities of rabbits, which are scarce, become at least a little more abundant to allow for a future recolonization of female links is dispersing naturally, looking for suitable habitat to find it here. That's something that we're now planning to start working on. That it's not so straightforward how to do that. There's been multiple attempts in Iberia and it's not clear what are the success factors and the unsuccessful factors. It's not clear. We're going to try to do the good practices, whatever has been working out there, trying new ones as well to see if we can find a way to bounce this back. One of the things that we noticed as we brought back the big grazers, it has been a change in the abundance and distribution of the few existing rabbits in the areas that we brought the large grazers to.
And what happens is that large grazers also play a role of facilitation in ecosystems, so they are facilitators for other species. And what we witnessed is that we had a distribution of rabbit in the areas before we bring the grazers that were mostly scattered around the thick bushy areas. So where there's like thick bush, they would stay around because they have the bush as cover for aerial predators and also for land predators. So they would make use of the bush as a protection. Once we brought in the large grazers and they start browsing and grazing around, opening these meadows with more open ground, we saw that the rabbits move their habitats from the thick bush to the open area so they were more present where large grazer usually are roaming and grazing. And one of the explanations for that I think, might be their facilitation role, which is grazers keep grazing and that kicks off the response from grasses to produce new shoots and these new shoots are usually more tender and more nutritious and that's what rabbits look for, that's one type of facilitation. The second is that large grazers usually are in herds, so they have social herds few number of them, 1012 animals put together, they are organized and they tend to dislike disturbance. So whenever there's fox or mangoes or civet or whatever coming by, they will react to it and shoot it away. And that's a little bit of protection for the rabbit too. So they facilitate a little bit of the protection by their massive presence. And we saw that response from the rabbit, from moving the encroached bush, which was like an umbrella type of protection, towards a more dynamic type of protection on the interaction with these large grazers. And so that's something that we are keen to keep monitoring, see how that affects the population of rabbit and how to help. But that's not the only, not a key solution, that's one compliment let's say, because rabbits now face situations, so for they have very low numbers, they are suffering from waves of different type of diseases.
[00:56:26] Speaker A: Wow.
[00:56:27] Speaker B: They are facing the lack of top predators, so they are facing a huge number of smaller predators that predate on this population. And on top of that, once over a year time, they have managed to survive all of these three first threats. So the disease, the low numbers and the high numbers of small predators, then by the end of the year when it's fall and winter, they are hunted, actively hunted. So if you think on a population ecology perspective, it makes no sense if you have a small population that is still striving to survive. But the ones that actually survive and gone through and maybe they are immune to the disease, maybe they know how to defend better from predators, maybe they are able to breathe because they have survived all these threats and in the end they get shot. You're actually reducing actively the capacity of the population to bounce back. So we need to have a combined approach. And this combined approach is either protect the existing wild populations from the small predators, maybe large grazers can help on that.
And that's one strategy, making sure that there's habitat, water sources, pasture land available for them to feed and have nutritious feed to allow them to breed and the end stop any hunting on that population. So we need to make sure that for period of ten years, 15 years, there's no hunting on that population, neither hunting or poaching, which is also another threat that we're still facing in the Co Valley. So that's been one of our ideas on the strategy to address where there is still some population, on other areas where there's no population at all. We need to reinforce or reintroduce populations again, making sure that they don't face hunting pressure from predators and they are able to find shelter and food in good quantities to allow them to breed. But I think one of the main keys here is going to be the presence of the top predator. So the top predator, and these are both Wolf and the Iberian links, they will make sure that the competition on predation is reduced, so they will drive away all the foxes and the badgers and that in their territories. And that's something that we need to make sure to have stable packs that have their territories cleared out of these smaller predators. A pack doesn't eat rabbits. A lone wolf, yes, might do as a surviving strategy, but for a pack, that's very too small of a prey to feed a pack. So usually instead of hunting, they actually provide protection. The same for the lynx. The lynx will make sure that anything else is competing with them on their territories. So even if they consume a lot of rabbits, because they need for their breeding, they are making sure there's not other predators doing so. So they're actually actively decreasing the predation on the rabbits by predating alone on the rabbits. And that's going to be one of the main keys if we want to make sure that the rabbits bounce back. So one of the ideas that we've been pursuing together with Rewilding Spain, which has the same kind of scenario in their landscape, is to request for experimental reintroductions of lynxes in areas where there's not enough rabbits to sustain. A lynx female to breathe but is enough to allow these links to play the top predator and actually umbrella type of protection role to the prey he wants to prey on later on. So that is something that we're working on to be able and have the license and permits to try out these strategies with the large predators. So these are the two main of course, these are all part of wider strategy. So it's not just about the predator itself, it's the whole circle of life completion. And that includes the scavengers and the aerial scavengers in this region are really an important aspect of the dynamic of the ecosystem here, because we have a huge population of vultures of different species present in this landscape.
[01:00:56] Speaker A: I just love how holistic this conversation has gotten. And it's such a big problem because here in the, you know, mesopretto release is a thing like when coyotes have gotten really big here. And I've had the pleasure of sitting down with Vedran, the veterinarian who helped found the life links project, which was really cool. Mihaw Krofel, also a big part of that. John Lanell, also a big part of that. And then also wolf experts like Valeria Salvatore. So it's so cool to see all of these different conversations come together and yours feels almost like the culmination, the coming together of all of these different specialists and you're doing all the things and it is absolutely incredible. And just the idea of bringing back the links is just this sounds so amazing.
So I promised that I wanted to get back to beavers and I want to do that right now. And maybe for those listening, I would love for you to explain a little further why beavers are so important and how they are directly related to one of the potential biggest conservation issues that we're going to face in the next decade or two, and that is water security and water availability. So beavers are one of the best nature based solutions to this problem. That is starting to be a big threat as we're seeing a lot in the United States with all these big droughts that are, know, water washout, all kinds of stuff. So I think I might have just given a whole bunch of spoilers. But why are beavers one of your top priorities for you in the Koa Valley?
[01:02:36] Speaker B: Yeah, well, basically because of everything you said that applies to the landscape as well. I mean, it's clear if you look, as you were mentioning, the southwest US. Which is dry and is facing the new challenges of climate change and water security, one of the consequences of that, the same happens here. We're in Iberia. So Iberia is just the next door to the Sahara, and Sahara is expanding. So you know that conditions will be much more arid that we have experienced so far. And if we don't have solutions to make the landscape more resilient to that change, then the end result is clear what can happen. It's going to have to be a more desert like landscape with less vegetation cover, with less water availability, and with it all alive, will at least be decreased in terms of numbers, densities and distribution. So beaver play a massive key role kind of solution for that because they are the ones building up the resilience of a landscape with increased frequency of droughts, increased average temperature, increased number of peak of heat during summer. So all of that finds shelter in the shady coolest areas of the landscape. And these are the water lines. If these water lines don't have beaver present, they will run off to the sea as fast as they can. They just drain. And what the beaver does is actually slowing down that drainage process to allow for the water to spread out out of the water lines into the surrounding areas, providing more habitat, providing more chances for that water to infiltrate. Allowing to slow down the speed of the flow of the river, allow for the mineral matter so all those deposits to settle down and not be eroded away to the beaches. So all of that is creating new spaces for water to hydrate the landscape, increasing the buffer zone of the waterways to their surroundings. I think it's in Germany where they have a law that says that within 20 meters of the waterway, that's beaver land, because that's what beaver will extend their influence to in case of their even if they're not present. It's just as prevention for 20 meters both ways, it's beaver land because that's going to be influenced. Nowadays, what we see is like these tiny deep creeks and small streams that look like a drain that have maybe a few line of trees on both sides. But besides that, it can be completely barren and arid. So the beaver plays a major role to change that situation. Increasing the water table by constructing the small dams allow for the water to spread so that this waterline, instead of having one line of trees, might have multiple trees growing surrounding us. They're food source. The more they chop down trees, the more copper the trees are, so the more shoots there will be, providing more shade, allowing for the cooling down of the water and allowing for that water to stay longer to infiltrate the ground levels. And that is key. And then in the COA, we have this historical moment where the greater COA valley only exists today because back in the 90s there was this massive public campaign against the construction of a mega hydropower.
The reason why that was stopped was because of the findings of the archaeological remains in the Co Valley that would be submerged by the waters of the dam. So there's no dam. And this has always been the answer to all the droughts. Build more dams. And we all know that doesn't work if there's no rain to feed those dams. The bigger dams actually increase the evaporation, losing even more water. And what we see below the dam is even more drought than before. So it feels like a natural solution, just contain the water in bulk. But in the end, it actually turns out as a counterintuitive result, which is less water availability for the landscape as a whole. So we contain it at the dam, but everything besides it is completely dry. What the beaver does is actually to the opposite. By constructing very small but multiple dams, creating the enlargement of the water banks and creating even more vegetation to cover allows for the water to retain. And that's what in the Koa. Since we stopped the dam, the dam is long gone and it's not going to be built. We need to bring that back. We need to bring the answer to the non construction of the dam, which is to allow for more dams to be built by the natural engineer that does so, which is the beaver. And I think that is the opportunity that we have here to showcase what is a different approach. Again to this landscape. Instead of lots of concrete to contain water, let's allow for the beaver to construct a lot of water reservoir that will benefit much larger areas of the landscape than a single huge big dam would be for a very tiny part of the landscape with all its negative consequences. But bringing back the beaver is of course, key. And again, by constructing a landscape or promoting a landscape that allows for lots of new water areas or humid areas to be created by beavers, creates more discontinuity in the landscape in case of fire. And we've seen that. Several times, it's been documented several times where beaver dams are present, it creates refuge for wildlife. Even in the case of fire, wildlife finds refuge inside these humid areas created by beavers. Beavers create what is called the beaver meadows, which is old remains of old dams, which are super rich in nutrients for grazers, invertebrates, pollinators everything and plus creates the discontinuity. Because if these humid areas are large enough, even if the fire comes, it will at least reduce the intensity to a point where it might just seize or be combated with a chance for the combat forces to actually put it out. Because as it is now, what we have is in case of extreme fire events, it's impossible to stop them. It's just biomass in the waiting to be consumed by fire.
And beavers act to stop that continuity of biomass, accumulated and dried, ready to burn with humid, dense areas of different habitat that allow both for a barrier for progression and refuge for wildlife, even escaping from a fire event.
[01:10:17] Speaker A: Yeah, exactly. I'm so glad that you went through even the science behind this. Like why this just makes sense. Because there's a big movement now, just like you said in the western United States, which parts of it are very similar lot part of the region that I lived in seems to with the Koa Valley. And there is a big push right now to bring back the beavers, like bring back the beavers and a lot of these things for the exact same reasons you just said. God, it's just so cool how the same solution could work on opposite sides of the world. So I love that you just went through all of.
[01:10:53] Speaker B: Compliment to that is mean in Portugal, at least here there's a national policy for the waterlines that promote the recovery of waterlines. And what they're doing yeah, and they're spending millions on it. And what they are doing is actually trying to mimic beavers. And it's super expensive.
[01:11:13] Speaker A: Just bring back beavers.
[01:11:15] Speaker B: Yeah, super expensive. It doesn't reach as far as it could and it would be much cheaper to bring back the beaver and making sure that the beaver has the conditions to stay and there's no conflict or any kind of it can promote coexistence with the beaver in this area instead of spending millions that needs to be renewed. So every time, every four or five years, they have to do it all again. It's super expensive, it's inefficient. And it is not a nature based solution. A nature based solution would be just bring back the beaver.
[01:11:51] Speaker A: I love how sometimes we humans try to replace nature, like do what nature does instead of just letting nature do what it does.
Yeah, just bring back the beaver. And then you will have the same pro restorative features or restoration that beavers do naturally. It's amazing.
And so I think a big part of this that we haven't touched on yet is the sustainability of all of this. So if we're looking long term, making sure that this lasts well into the future, all this amazing restoration and rewilding work you're doing in the Koa Valley, making it, ensuring that it's here for the long term is so important and this comes to essentially the monetization of the Koa Valley. And I personally work in conservation tourism, nature based tourism myself and I saw that through on your website. You have also started to take the ideas from nature based tourism and ecotourism to essentially bring money to this area. So could you talk more about that? Why did you decide to start the center that you have? What is there? How did you go about that? And what are your hopes and ideas and dreams of this part of the Koa Valley? Essentially making it worth something to people that not just live there, but like me, like I could essentially come and experience the amazingness of the Koa Valley because you've given me the opportunity to do that. So could you talk more about that? How's that idea come to place? What do you have set up, what are the hopes for the future, all those things?
[01:13:39] Speaker B: Yeah, no, definitely. So, of course that's a big challenge always to think about what is going to be the long term perspective to sustain what the efforts are now being done and how it will be carry on into the future. How can we make sure that this is not all in vain and after the first grant, people just change ideas and move away.
I usually say that we're here for a generational purpose. So this is not the one off project type of approach. We're here for a long term commitment. It's an initiative that just started. So we need to find a way to sustain that process. And of course, we've been addressing several and we are on the process to make it sustainable, but we already started. So one of the things that we've done so far and I think it's really important is that we are trying to change the economic perspective for this landscape from extractive and subsidy dependence type of economy towards a different nature based economy where companies and people that might set up their own enterprises look for nature as a non extractive resource that they can monetize from, therefore making their living making sure that can stay on the landscape. So we were witnessing several of these people that are willing, they like it, they are enthusiastic. What they were missing is there is capacity and reach. So they're on their own, each one of them trying their own enterprise disconnected. So the first thing we noticed, that because we did a landscape business analysis or economic analysis, and from there we created a landscape business plan. So knowing what are the economic strengths and weaknesses and from that design a strategy to provide more support to the ones that we find that are relevant to the goals that we are proposing as a nature restoration initiative.
From there, we noticed that there's all of these tourism enterprise popping up throughout the landscape, but they weren't connected. So we created this Wild COA network, which is a network of now 40 something businesses 48 or so, 47 to 48 different businesses in the landscape that have accommodation, guiding heights, transport products, several enterprises and combining them together. In this network so that they can create products and services that take into account and work together with other business from the network to propose or to give to the market new and more ambitious type of products and services. So that the markets have now like a chance or the public that comes from those markets, they have now a chance to come and use multiple services or products from the many companies in the network. So this allow us to create packages that will attract people from outside market that usually each one of these companies wouldn't have the capability to attract on their own. So someone might come to an accommodation and book with a guide that needs a transport and will consume some of the products from another company, but they will only have one acquisition, let's say, which is to book it. So they will book it and all these providers will serve their products or services put together, but for the client, it doesn't have to look out for all the different companies to book it. And it can be either like a standardized booking or a tailor made. So we can do it both. And that will gather the different aspects and on their own, because they are giving more services and having more clients from the network on their own as an individual company, they increase their portfolio and also their standard as a company itself, so they actually attract more business and more clients themselves as well. So they're benefiting both ways as companies. And we started with the tourism sector because honestly the easiest. So if you think about nature restoration and rewilding, what are people looking for, to visit, to know, to come and see? And what is a more easily nature friendly business if tourism done well, it can't be that one. So we started that, but we're not looking to stay there to keep on that. So now we're working a lot with bringing at producers. So producers who use regenerative farming, organic farming that they produce with wild, they source their materials from the wild, they promote wilder areas. So all of those who are now producing that kind of product, we want to integrate more and more. So to create this critical mass of producers, to provide the network and the different tourism sector with those products, and also to be able to reach out and sell outside more of those products. So increasing their value as companies within this landscape to become companies that can face off what is more easily done in this type of situation is just extraction with no feeding back. So that's something that we're now working on. And one of the products that we're very proud of that comes in cooperation with a preventive measure for wolf. So we create this synergy between the sheep farmers in the region that had already adopted some of the preventive measures and they weren't using the wool for anything. And we found a company that actually wanted wool to insert in their production chain that is produced in Portugal. So they want to source their wool closer to the production in Portugal and that could benefit wildlife as well. So the sheep farmers that used to have as a cost the shearing of wolf, because the market price for wool is net zero and they still have to pay for someone to shear the sheep, they had it as a cost. We turned that into an income. So profit. So basically what we did, we got this company, they were looking to source their wool. We agreed with them that they would pay above average prices for the wolf, plus they would pay for the shearing. So we took away the cost of hearing from these shepherds. The company now hires the shearing for them and then it pays on an average of six times the market prices for the wool. So no cost, more profit, as long as these people have good coexistent practices. So they have the preventive measures in place.
And this has been key. So we're now waiting for the launch of the shoe that is going to be made with this wool by the end of this year. And that is something and that we are now on the pipeline to launch. And we want to do the same with the cattle producer. So we want to find a way that we are benefiting the cattle producers that have already changed their managing practices and adopted preventive measures or might have integrated pioneering the integration of guarding dog with cattle herds to benefit from this effort of living alongside with large predators so that their product can be sold with more profit for them. So that's something that we're now looking at and how to address it, but it's something. So we started with tourism, want to go to this product, but we will reach service at a higher scale. So it's an evolving strategy and I think the Wildco network is a great achievement as a result. But it's not the end. So we need to increase these. And it all came back. It all was based on the first thing that we did, which is to look at the landscape as it is on economic terms and from there design a business plan that could change. What were the downturns and the weaknesses into opportunities and actually providing benefits for people who are living and making their livelihoods here in the presence of a rewilding landscape, in the presence of wildlife, predators and so forth. Coming back, how will this benefit the people directly who live in this landscape? Starting with tourism, moving to products, going for the ones that are even more difficult, such as livestock, and then in the end surfaces and otherwise, that we will keep researching and developing.
[01:22:34] Speaker A: Wow, I'm blown away for this entire conversation. Pedro, I don't know if it is something you haven't thought of, which is.
[01:22:43] Speaker B: No, we haven't talked about culture.
[01:22:48] Speaker A: Well, go ahead. Yeah, actually, yes.
[01:22:52] Speaker B: I have my T shirt today. Well, it's in Portuguese, but it says the art come back to the wild.
[01:23:00] Speaker A: Basically, I want that shirt. It's amazing.
[01:23:05] Speaker B: So this is the merch from our ongoing POA, the Corridor of Arts land art festival.
It's happening this whole month of July. We're almost at the end, but it's again a cultural expression that aims to promote the Greater Koa Valley as one big destination that is not just nature, that not just archaeology and history, but it's new cultural and arts expression. So as a backstory, so the Kua has been known for its paleolithic engravings, open air polylytic engravings in the slabs of rock in the Upper Kua Valley that were discovered in the became the biggest open air paleolithic expression in Europe. So petroglyphs that are out there and depict wildlife, but have a history of depiction of those petroglyphs throughout the ages. So it start 33,000 years ago with the first engravings of our rocks and tarpon, wild horse and ivags and deer. And it went all through the ages, the Neolithic, the Bronze Age and Iron Age, until the last one that's officially engraving in the archaeological park dates back from 1954. So it comes to the 20th century. So we have like this wow, 33,000 year old tradition of expressing art through engraving in the landscape, in the COA. And we knew that. So since then that became a park. It's well known, it's world known, it's a UNESCO site, it's unbelievable.
It's a must go visitation spot. When you're coming to the Koa, you have to have the experience of going to see the engravings live in the rocks, which is super impressive. And then we start thinking how to create a cultural event that could have to that tradition and at the same time be flagged to show the greater kua valley worldwide and to bring public to the Kua valley, to know the area, to know these wild kuwa network enterprises and companies their services. And at the same time have some real expression. So we created the Corridor of Arts event that was a call for land art pieces to be installed within the Greater Koa Valley in the landscape, made out of natural material to respect their natural decay and natural interaction with the surrounding environment. So from the 300 and something applications we had, which was crazy to select, we finally ended up with six artists to do a residency during the first quarter of this year. So they came, they stayed and they created their pieces together with the communities. And the community is quite variable what kind of community they were selecting and working on. It was interesting. There were people working with stone masons or cork harvesters or even a Toropolitical community to create pieces that were then installed in the landscape that will stay as landmarks for this landscape. So they ended up and then we have this one month event that's going to travel from town to town. There's five main towns in the Koa and we are going to have each weekend, one event happening in each of those five towns. So five weekends in a row, we're having more than 70 artists doing music, theater, movies, performance during a week long in each of the towns and attracting the people to come for the festival to see the art pieces. To meet the artists, to get involved, to buy products and services from the Wild Koa network producers who are on site on these events. So all of this together, putting this out and creating a lot of buz so that people notice that the Koa Valley is a greater Kuwa Valley, a huge landscape, it's a coherent landscape, has archaeology, history, gastronomy, culture, nature, and now this contemporary expression of land art. I think all six pieces that were created are really amazing.
Upcoming artists that should keep an eye on because they are going to build really relevant pieces. And I think the six pieces that we created for the Goa Arts Festival, it's really interesting. So from tomorrow we will start the last of the events in the Villanova de Foskua, the last town. We moved from south to the north. So we went from Rogu Pineal and now finally Foskua. And it has been incredible journey because it has involved a lot of people. I'm super grateful for the team and the partners to put up this festival. And it's the first stone, it's going to be the first edition we are going to repeat. It not clear exactly how, but after we're finished this festival, we're going to decide and probably something that we're going to be marking the cultural landscape of the country to have happening in the Koa with this land art festival.
[01:28:49] Speaker A: How cool. That was going to be my next question. I'm like, please tell me you're doing this again, because I'm literally so far away and I would have loved to have been a part of that, but it sounds like, okay, good for all of us listening, that's going to happen again.
Some version of it will happen again, thank God, because I would love to somehow be a part of that because what you're doing is just absolutely incredible. Wow.
So I did want to make a little bit of a switch here. I put out to the Rewildologist network everyone I asked for questions, if anyone had any questions for you. And I got a couple back. So some of this first one, I think you've addressed it pretty well. But there is one part of this question that I'm very curious to hear your answer to. So it is from Sandra Swart at Wildpasts Underscore on Twitter. Her question was, is there a particular Portuguese form of rewilding, or are the general principles at play here?
[01:29:53] Speaker B: Yeah, so on the specifics of the restoration action in Portuguese, I wouldn't say we can't call it Portuguese. It would have to be Iberian, because that's the biome that we work in, the great Iberia.
So the border is administrative and now cultural. But anyway, it's not natural.
So that's not specific to Portugal, but to Iberia that is. So I mentioned it before, we have Iberian lynx, Iberian wolf, rabbits play a key role in this ecosystem. So there's something that in Central Europe is different. So those are more specific type of things. And then there is a cultural aspect that I think both in Portugal and Spain is similar, but also in some other parts of Europe, which is the notion of follow land. And I think when you leave nature to recover its own fertility of the soils by not doing nothing, and it is a principle of rewilding. And sometimes when I'm talking with people here on the ground, it's easier to say, oh, this is just followland. It's just poseyu. We're just giving a little bit of time. Maybe it's a long time poseu. It's not just one year or three years. It's like three decades. But it's the same principle. Just let nature recover itself. And that's something that was embedded in agriculture, in farming practices in the past, that fertilizers have been made obsolete. But if you think about it, without the fertilizer, people immediately understand what are the goals of letting nature come back so that the fertility of the soil species come back, water availability is enhanced, and that's the notion of posiu follow land. It's not specific to Portugal or Ibira, but in here, as the specificity of the landscape here has to be done in a certain way, and that in other areas is different. So it's easy for people to understand. And we use it very often to communicate our message or our approach.
[01:32:03] Speaker A: Oh, that's fantastic. The second part was, have you had any local breakthroughs that surprised you?
[01:32:10] Speaker B: Yeah, well, after five years of the work on the ground, yes, I mentioned a few. So the adoption of guarding dogs with cattle, it's completely new for not just the region, but the whole country.
And it was surprising to see that some pioneers actually adopted it and show that it was possible, and that brought other people to join. So that to me, was a great breakthrough. They used more recently, the Land Art Festival, which is a cultural event, is providing a lot of opening contacts and openness to other things that we might do because we're promoting this we're attracting people, bringing new publics, new interest to this region. And then people say, oh yeah, these guys are taking a lot. It's not just nature, they also do arts and culture. So that also was more recent breakthrough and there's more, but yeah, that's so cool.
[01:33:18] Speaker A: Yes, it's amazing when you go into this from the science side, all about the nature and then learn that culture and art is just as important and how you've been able to weave those in is just amazing. And I think that we will wrap up this amazing conversation with Hassan Bayan's question, and that is, how can we get more involved without speaking Portuguese?
[01:33:45] Speaker B: No, it's possible. And we do have a lot of people, some people coming from abroad to get involved. So I will say this, but one of the most important things, if you want to help, is to spread the word, to communicate, to interact, to ask questions and come and visit and take your perceptions out there. I think it's super important.
Then we have a few opportunities on volunteering short or longer term. So we have people who don't speak any Portuguese, volunteering for the fire surveillance. And it's something that you come to volunteer for a week or two, doing some surveillance, but on the remaining time you can enroll with the activities of the team, so helping out on monitoring or restoration elsewhere. So it's also good. And make use of our wildcoa network and book your visits here, use our partners who will, I'm sure, tailor a good visit for you. So I think there's always a chance if you want to be more supportive in terms of helping with finance. We have a patron, we have the patron working now and just look at our website, there's many other different opportunities to get involved, contact us.
[01:35:04] Speaker A: Sounds fantastic. And as always, I have all relevant links in the show notes and I will love to promote this amazing cultural experience that you have and then, of course, all these opportunities to volunteer with you and visit. I actually just informed somebody of your nature, tourism in like a Facebook group last week. They were like, I'm going to Europe and I want to visit a Rewilding project. I'm like, oh, I have somebody say hi to Pedro if you go. So I will also have all of those. Course, of course. And Pedro, thank you for your time, your dedication to your home and making it a more wild, beautiful place. So, again, thanks for sharing your story with me and everybody in the Rewatology community.
[01:35:50] Speaker B: Yeah, well, thank you very much, Brooke, and thank you for inviting and giving us the chance to show to your immense public what we're doing, raising awareness. And I have to thank for it and also thank for the team and partners here at Rewild in Portugal, which make this all happen. It's not just me. No, single handed, it's a lot of dedicated and very competent and enthusiastic people that make this happen, and I hope you and your listeners come to visit someday. We're open. Please make use of our contacts to visit, and thanks again for the chance to speak with you.
[01:36:32] Speaker A: Thank you for joining me on this wild adventure today. I hope you've been inspired by the incredible stories, insights and knowledge shared in this episode. To learn more about what you heard, be sure to check out the show
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