The Ria de Alvor on the south coast of the Algarve of Portugal is a protected wetland
facing similar threats to those of Cabo de Gata. A new urban owner of the land wants
to develop it for ‘eco-tourism’ (& a golf course) and the French conservation charity
A Rocha is involved in attenuated legal battles to defend its protected status against
machinations to evade that status.
As in Galicia ‘rias’ are broad estuarine creeks, large inlets from the sea coast,
Abers in Wales & Brittany. Ria de Alvor is surrounded by limestone outcrops with
a large once- traditional estate, Quinta da Rocha, occupying much of it. Like Cabo
de Gata it contains saltings. Here the coast is subject to voluminous Atlantic tides
which fill and empty its lagoons with a richly varied animate ecology. It is now
one of the few relict resorts for migrant flamingos (amongst other species) in Portugal.
These pages are a mainly visual personal homage to a special place.
On the south western shores of Ynys Môn, (Môn mâm Cymru) Avon Crugyll drains farms
on a low peneplaned hinterland, with lush banks meandering first through gorse common
then behind high sanddunes through bare salt marsh. Its tang, taste, feel, bleakness
and bird calls are so embedded in memory, even in those days tinged with nostalgia,
that they can be recalled in an instant. My bedroom from late childhood on looked
out directly over that bleak wildness. At its small narrow window set in a thick
stone wall, open to the evening air, I would sit chin on knees on its wide sill when
my parents took quiet ‘family free’ walks, watching their still young figures cross
the little footbridge over the river, vanish into the peace of hilly dunes with thyme-fragrant
orchid-speckled slacks beyond, awaiting their return. The plaints of redshanks and
sandpipers here in Ria de Alvor awaken vivid images of that return in late dusk disturbing
the marsh birds. Once they were over the ramshackle bridge I would slide back into
bed, listen for the door opening then closing, subdued murmurs so as not to awaken
the four of us, the signal to fall asleep to the melancholic redshank serenade punctuated
occasionally by oyster catchers and pectoral sandpipers. The late Irish Mail train
had time since traversed the long embankment parting gorse from marsh, thundering
across its metal bridge over the river, its acrid trail of coal smoke and steam dispersed.
Here in Alvor small local diesel trains rush by between marsh and farms, rumble the
viaduct similarly. Discovering late in life, such a vividly familiar kind of place
collides rather differing pleasures, the re-exploration of an ecology and a nostalgia
so deep it cannot be permitted to surface. Not even Proust could match this one!
The attenuated catenary of experience suspended between these two episodes blurs,
fades into insignificance, serves only to tinge the new experience with the old when
I pause here on this path.This river is wider, deeper, its tidal estuary of mobile
sand flats beyond the low sea wall more extensively open. Aber Crugyll meandered
naturally through a dune gorge to wilder seas that pressed it close to the shore
of a broad sandy bay between rocky arms, exposed to south westerlies. Ria de Alvor,
doubly protected by walls and low dunes, fills and empties through a mole-lined exit
from deep Atlantic tides. The inner marsh is fed and drained through a narrow culvert
where mullet and trout pass in and out of the lagoons and crayfish lurk. A quiet
place this where people cockle on mud flats, seek venus clams at low tide or fish
when tides are full, where the crashing of Atlantic breakers on the long beaches
of Meia Praia and Praia de Alvor is softened by distance, held at arms’ length by
those low dune barriers. But it is the same deep muffled roar heard in that space-time-distant
bedroom.
Behind though, the land here is totally different, far far less windswept, farms
with orchards where apricots and pomegranate flowers glow in rich foliage, farms
converted into villas nestling in deep groves of apricot, fig and medlar. In that
childhood home a tree was a miracle if it reached the height of an adolescent child
and apricots came in tins in ‘family food parcels’ from Australia. In these groves
of Ria de Alvor orioles call melodiously, but rarely, fleetingly vouchsafe the gift
of green and glowing gold flashing past; over them bee eaters chirrup, gleaming cyan
and burnished bronze as they twist in the sunlight, swooping from their perches on
the wild orange trees to hawk huge dark carpenter bees. On Maytime mornings massed
flights of swallows, martins and swifts perform their bewildering speed ballet feeding
frenzies over lagoons or grassland, cattle egrets sail over ‘shy’ stilts incessantly
protesting my presence - even more that of my dog companion (for whom they hold no
fascination) - reaching an agonisingly frenzied combination of noise and threat-flying
if one passes nearby seemingly unperturbed chicks. Sometimes common tern fish the
tide over the inlets; little tern occasionally nest, if that is an appropriate term
for tern habits, on the shallow sands of lagoons where whimbrels lament. Last year
one sick flamingo lingered long after the general exodus. This year, after an unusually
wet winter inundated the inner sand flats there are neither flamingos nor little
terns there, though the latter occasionally pass, fishing where the tide’s cockle
white edges define sandbanks. And, yes, redshanks are here; the same plaintive nostalgia
seeps out of memory, dredging deeper memories, unbearable longings masked within
the strange palimpsest unlocked by this southern experience.
© Michael Selwood 2010
Below part of the Quinta da Rocha bought by an urban entrepreneur apparently with
little knowledge of and no love for either local tradition or conservation law in
a legally protected environment, seeing only BIG EUROS not Eros lining those clouds.
It occurs to me how different is the approach in Cabo de Gata. Most of that coastal
strip is owned by one family (Montoya-Diaz, 3000 Ha) who go to enormous lengths on
their land to practice thoughtful conservation techniques in both herding and cultivation
but are also engaged in tourism. It is a exemplary landownership of a statutory protected
environment in which they sometimes find themselves in opposition to the authorities
who wish to see it ‘developed’. How ironical this reversal is compared with Ria de
Alvor! This was probably the way of the previous landowners of Quinta da Rocha.
