Regenerative Agriculture in the Algarve: Ten Years of Learning on Degraded Mediterranean Land

What regenerative farming means for the specific conditions of Serra de Monchique — thin soils, summer drought, wildfire risk.

Regenerative agriculture is a term that has grown rapidly in use and, with that growth, some loss of precision. It covers a wide range of practices and philosophies, from no-till farming on prairie grain land to food forest design in the tropics. Understanding what it means specifically for the conditions of the Algarve highlands requires setting aside the generalities.

The Serra de Monchique presents a particular set of challenges. The soils are thin and acidic — granite-based in the lower hills, schist and greywacke higher up — and have been depleted by decades of poor land management and repeated burning. The terrain is steep, and rainfall, though generous by Portuguese standards, arrives almost entirely between October and April. From May onwards, the land is under severe moisture stress. Springs that flow strongly in January can be dry by July.

These are not ideal conditions for food production. They are, however, conditions that Mediterranean farmers have managed successfully for thousands of years — before the combination of rural depopulation, cheap food imports, and policy incentives for eucalyptus plantations stripped this landscape of the knowledge and the people needed to work it.

Start with water

Regenerative agriculture, as we practise it here, is largely a matter of rebuilding what was lost. The starting point is always water. In a landscape defined by summer drought, the ability to hold water — to slow its passage through the landscape, to recharge the springs that dry up in summer, to keep soils moist enough to support plant growth through the dry season — determines almost everything else.

This means earthworks: swales dug on contour to intercept runoff, ponds to capture and store winter rainfall, and the restoration of the stone-lined water channels that once distributed spring water around each hillside. Before planting anything, before bringing in animals, before planning a rotational system, we fix the water.

Build the soil

The second priority is soil. Thin, degraded soils cannot support productive agriculture, and they cannot support the kind of plant and microbial diversity that makes an ecosystem resilient. Building soil on bare, compacted ground is a slow process — but it can be accelerated. Deep-rooted pioneer plants break up compaction and draw up minerals. Green manures, composted animal waste, and wood chip mulch add organic matter. Managed grazing — where animals are moved through the land in a way that stimulates plant growth rather than depleting it — builds soil carbon while producing food. The soil biology that underpins all of this takes years to establish, but once it is working, the land repays it.

Design for diversity

The third element is diversity. A single crop or a single species is vulnerable — to pests, to disease, to weather events, to market fluctuations. A diverse system has redundancy built in. If one element fails, others compensate. On our farms, we aim for diversity at every level: diverse tree species in the canopy, diverse shrubs and perennials in the understorey, diverse annual vegetables in the cleared beds, diverse animals working different layers and functions. This is not chaos — it requires design and management — but it is a fundamentally different relationship with the land than monoculture farming.

Fire resilience is not a separate goal

The fourth element, and the one most specific to this landscape, is fire resilience. Every planting decision, every water management decision, every grazing decision is also a fire management decision. Dense dry scrub burns catastrophically. A managed mosaic of productive land, moist terraces, and mixed canopy does not. The same practices that build productive, ecologically rich land in the Serra de Monchique are the ones that reduce the landscape's vulnerability to wildfire. This is not a coincidence — it is the reason we built the Monchique Stewardship System around the integration of these elements.

Ten years of practice at Quinta Picapau, and the lessons learned from the 2018 fire, form the practical foundation of our approach. The work we are now doing at Raízes da Montanha is the second iteration — an opportunity to apply those lessons from the beginning, on land that starts in worse condition and with a clearer sense of what works. We are documenting the process as we go.