Background

As wildfires rages across the Estrela mountain ranges in Portugal, many began to believe this was the end of mountain life as we know it. There had already been years of youth drain from the highlands. A combination of low wages, hard work and diminishing social prospects led to a collapse in number of younger people happy to take their parents farms on. In the words of one local farmer, “it is no the fires that push people away, it is the loss of hope”.

This story began a long time ago, long before the fires started. This story began after the Second World War where under the command of a new regime, Portugal began tearing down their native woodlands and planting conifer plantation in their stead. Fast growing, water hungry, this army of pines soon become the next industrial boom of the highlands. This has ben the status quo for the last 60 years. The mountains, once known for their ingenious water canals and mixed croped farms, had become a landscape scale factory for timber and toilet paper production.

Fires in the Mediterranean are not rare… in fact, the Mediterranean biome is defined by the presence of fires not absence. Fires naturally clear dead wood and pave the way for pioneering ash loving plants. Fires renew. The problem the mountains began to face was the sheer frequency and magnitude of the fires of fires. The year before we visited the mountains (2022) there was the biggest burn to date. In total more than 1/10 of the mountains had caught a balaze.

So… what were we doing here? Where hope was begnning to get lost a small group of pioneering scientists had began to fight against the wildfires. Their secret weapon is the native woodlands of the Estrela. These native trees are fire phobic and can withstands and survive huge temperatures. This makes sense when you remember that they evolved in this habitat and needed to weather the fires to get this far.

This documentary film is about URZE, the small charity that is fighting the flames and in the process, return hope to the Estrela range.