If tourism was to fail?

This wasn’t a rally, but a meeting of various people with different experiences in life - working in different areas - which in one way or another reflected the current economic situation of the Algarve. They talked of bureaucracy, corruption, their own experiences, of a standardised Europe that doesn’t look at traditions – and of the difficulty in establishing projects in practically all economic fields.

The discussion began with optimism. Fernando Canteiro, who has worked in sports and Nature Tourism projects for the last 20 years, said that tourism would benefit a great deal if the country in general, and the region in particular, “pedalled harder”. The proof is the success of his own business - which started with a micro-niche in the market and is today a self-sustaining sector.

For the man behind the firm «Megasport», the Algarve is one of the most interesting regions for Nature Tourism in Europe, owing to the diversity of scenery and habitats within such a relatively small area.

Nonetheless, and as was mentioned in the debate by a young Portuguese lady who lived for the last 17 years in Germany, reality from the common citizen’s point of view is quite different. “I was very naïve to bring my bicycle over here”, she said. Cycling continues to be a fairly suicidal idea in any Algarve town – though Canteiro considered that the blue ‘cycle’ lines painted recently along the sides of some of the region’s busiest and most dangerous roads were “a good start”.

Less optimistic was Fernando Silva Grade, of the «Almargem» association who talked about the visual aspect of our urban landscape – and even the rural Algarve – in a region that needs to attract tourists in order to survive. “I feel that we still haven’t grasped how serious the situation is. You only have to look around. It’s an aberration – the total rundown, third-world nature of things here, there and everywhere”, he said.

“That’s the Algarve today”. Why? “If someone wants to construct a sustainable situation – something that fits within the ancestral culture of the Algarve -, they’re faced with a thousand obstacles. But if they want to build a tower block of apartments on a cliff, overlooking a beach, they’ll have no difficulties at all”. “The mayors of the Algarve have all spearheaded this politics of destruction of their homeland”, he added.

Discussion on alternatives to tourism brought agricultural politics over the last 30 years into the ring. José Chumbinho, from the association of Algarve beekeepers, bemoaned the “agony” of this primary sector in the region – due to European rules and regulations and the incompetence of successive governments.

He gave the example that beekeepers, by law, must sell 500 litres of honey per year. In other words, they have to become industrialised – so the traditional craft of making homemade honey, which always results in a quality product, comes to an end. Not only that, beekeepers are prohibited from marketing the by-products of their hives – like honey vinegar, or honey brandy.

This is because there is a labyrinth of legal obstacles – and once through those, the keepers lack the necessary “support infrastructures”, like laboratories and distribution networks. In other words, a lack of long-term vision has bankrupted many cultivators and farmers – Carlos Brito, a former ostrich farmer whose project failed even with EC backing, recalled.

Chumbinho also lamented the desperate situation for those living in the Algarve’s interior hill and mountain ranges, which have been completely neglected – and where there are villages that have been without inhabitants for decades.

And while the interior falls apart “the State spends 3 million euros on the «Allgarve» cultural identity” to promote a form of tourism similar to that of Latin America (Cuba, Dominican Republic, etc.) and Asia, said Patricio Serendero.

The general consensus of the debate was that Portugal today is “a country with obscure laws governing the licensing of productive activities”. And that public services are at best “useless” and at worse “prejudicial” to all small initiatives and forms of private enterprise.

A practical example of this was given by Isabel Paes, who in 1990 had the idea to refurbish a palatial 17th century home and protected monument in Tavira into a guesthouse. She opened the doors for business four years later, after a tortuous process through the maze of national bureaucracy – and then found herself faced with the problem of local corruption! Astonished to find that she had no clients, she went to the Tourism Post to find out why they weren’t informing tourists about her guesthouse. The employee on duty – a civil servant – replied that they weren’t paid enough to do so. She also had taxi drivers asking her how much commission she’d pay them if they brought tourists straight from the airport to her door. Paes had to publish in a local newspaper that she wasn’t paying commissions to anyone – much to the dissatisfaction of the town. Sadly, all her efforts were in vain. With the globalisation of tourism, the crisis and competition, her business was only sustainable until 2002. Today, it’s dying on its feet.

In conclusion, Cecília Honório, one of BE’s leading candidates for the legislative elections, stressed the need for “a serious, consistent commitment to economic diversity” to end, once and for all, the “predatory, easy profit” form of tourism, which “causes huge imbalances and wastes the wealth of the region”.

“How can we change? One way for sure is a relationship between the university and the social and economic fabric of the region. Another is a massive battle that clearly requires sweeping changes to laws that have held the Algarve hostage to property speculation and the financial might of civil construction”, she considered.

For the candidate “there are laws that need to be changed fast – before the Algarve closes for good. We need to change laws to protect local producers. We need to change the jungle of laws over Projects of National Interest (PINs), which use the PIN title to bypass all the rules”, she concluded – reinforcing her intention to take all these subjects to Parliament.