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Report “The Messengers of the Woods” (6/6). In the capital of Portugal, Monsanto boasts a vast expanse of pine and oak trees. A city forest that was laid out 85 years ago and yet seems to have always been there. Visit to forest engineer Fernando Louro Alves.
A magnificent forest, that of Monsanto, stretches over 1,000 hectares to the west of Lisbon. Undulating waves of pine, oak and eucalyptus trees thus cover the heights of the Portuguese city, voted “European Green Capital” in 2020. Even astronaut Thomas Pesquet from the International Space Station praised her on social media. Few tourists are aware of this vast forest area, which covers a tenth of the city’s area. Every day, Lisbon residents enter the heart of this precious lung to jog, walk their dog or take the road that crosses it.
Fernando at Monsanto Forest Park in Lisbon on April 6, 2022. VASSILI FEODOROFF FOR THE WORLD
Stadtwald is an oxymoron, a formula overused by many mayors who want to communicate about the quality of life in their city. Berlin has one. So does Lisbon, and this one seems to have always been part of the facility. In reality, Monsanto is less than a hundred years old. It was born in 1938 from a somewhat crazy project, as its visitors are reminded by the red plaques, at a time when there was still no talk of the fight against pollution. “The illusion of an old-growth forest works because in ninety years people have been doing work on trees and plants that nature could have done alone… but in five thousand years,” commented proudly Fernando Louro Alves, Monsanto’s executive director at City Hall Lisbon.
No corner of this park, where he has been practicing for forty years, holds no secrets for him. Every morning, the 62-year-old forest engineer marvels at the appearance of one of the 23 species of wild orchids that bloom there, a testament to the vitality of the ecosystem. He lets the 10,000 cork oaks, the emblematic tree of Portugal, live their lives in peace, without debarking them like elsewhere in the country to recover the precious cork. Crackling disturbs the calm of the undergrowth. Fernando Louro Alves immediately raises his head to the canopy and looks for squirrels: “They are very good at hiding in those Aleppo pines. They love their little apples, which don’t hurt their teeth,” laughs the engineer.
Brutal expropriations
This lush urban forest was born on hostile territory. “The Serra de Monsanto, that mountain range that dominates the city, protected dry farmland depleted by grazing in the early 20th century,” says Fernando Louro Alves. But in 1934, a certain Duarte Pacheco, engineer and politician, influenced by the work of geologists and foresters, imagined reforesting these mountains. “Pacheco’s beliefs were guided by a hygienist-oriented health ideology, summed up in the formula ‘mens sana in corpore sano’,” explains Fernando Louro Alves.
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