Rewilding in Serra de Monchique: What Land Restoration Looks Like in Practice
Rewilding is often discussed in abstract terms. Here is what it means for one abandoned hillside in the Algarve.
The word rewilding has become fashionable. In academic and policy circles, it tends to mean large-scale ecological restoration — returning apex predators, ceasing intensive land management, and allowing nature to reassert itself. In the Serra de Monchique, we use the word differently.
Here, the challenge is not that the land has been managed too intensively. The challenge is that it has been abandoned entirely.
Across much of the Algarve highlands, the pattern is the same. Smallholdings that once supported families — with orchards, terraces, animals, and kitchen gardens — have been empty for twenty or thirty years. The stone walls have collapsed. The water channels have silted up. The terraces have slumped. And in place of the mosaic of managed vegetation that once characterised this landscape, there is now a uniform blanket of dense, dry scrub — cistus, bramble, gorse, and invasive eucalyptus — that burns with extraordinary ferocity in summer.
The 2018 wildfire in Monchique — which burned nearly 27,000 hectares in a single week — was not primarily a climate story, though the drought conditions that August made everything worse. It was a land management story. The landscape had become a fuel store.
Rewilding is not abandonment
Rewilding, for us, means reversing that process. It does not mean returning the land to a pre-human state. That concept has limited relevance for a landscape that has been managed by people for thousands of years. The cork oak woodlands of the Serra de Monchique are not a wilderness — they are a cultural landscape, shaped over millennia by grazing, harvesting, burning, and planting. The ecological richness of that landscape depended on that management continuing.
What we are working to restore is the working mosaic: the mix of orchards, food forests, grazed terraces, water features, and productive smallholdings that once defined this hillside and made it resilient to fire.
Water first
Practically, this means several things. The starting point is always water. The stone-lined water channels — levadas — that once moved spring water around the Serra have largely collapsed. Reinstating them, alongside earthworks that slow and spread rainfall, is one of the first priorities on any piece of land we work with. Water in the landscape fundamentally changes fire behaviour. A moist soil and a canopy dripping with morning dew does not carry a fire the same way a bone-dry hillside does in August.
Animals and diversity
It means introducing animals. Grazing, done well, is one of the most effective tools for managing vegetation. A flock of sheep or goats working through scrubby hillside will remove the combustible undergrowth that fuels a wildfire, while fertilising the soil and making way for more diverse plant communities. Managed grazing is not a compromise — it is a cornerstone of how this landscape was maintained for centuries.
It means planting diversity. A monoculture of eucalyptus or pine burns readily and recovers poorly. A mixed food forest — with cork oak, carob, fig, pomegranate, olive, and a dense understorey of aromatic herbs and nitrogen-fixing shrubs — is harder to burn, faster to recover, and produces food alongside its ecological function.
Presence is part of the system
And it means being present. Someone living and working on the land is an early warning system. They notice the dry gully that needs clearing, the fence that's letting livestock stray, the accumulation of deadwood that could feed a fire. Abandoned land has no one watching.
This is what rewilding means in the Serra de Monchique. Not wilderness, but a landscape that is actively managed, ecologically rich, and genuinely resilient — to fire, to drought, and to the pressures that have emptied this hillside over the past three decades. The Monchique Stewardship System is our attempt to document that approach in enough detail that others can apply it.