Interviews
The three interviews presented here are the result of the FIREUSES project's collaboration with the TERRATREME film producer, which began in 2023. Under the title History and memory of the place of fire in territorial sciences in Portugal, this series of filmed conversations aimed, firstly, to map the presence of the theme of rural wildfires and fire uses in research frameworks, academic curricula and, in general, in the scientific concerns of three academic fields that were central to the construction of knowledge about Portuguese territory throughout the 20th century: geography, agronomy and forestry. Secondly, we sought to broaden the academic focus to the memory of the transformation of rural landscapes, based on the life and family experiences of the interviewees in different regions of the country. As will be seen, this attention has provided important data and reflections which, while being closely linked to the practice of the profession, contribute to a history of fire in Portugal and, in particular, to understanding the emergence of major fires in the Portuguese hinterlands.
The interviewees are three professors and researchers who generously and interestedly shared with us their knowledge and memories, drawn mainly from their academic career, between graduation and the present day. They offer answers to many of the questions and doubts that we had foreseen in the scripts prepared by the FIREUSES team, but they also outline contributions to a history of Portuguese geography, agronomy and forestry. It became quite clear, for example, that the view of fire, in its various aspects, developed through substantially different chronologies and approaches.
In the first interview, with Raquel Soeiro de Brito, a geographer and retired professor at the Universidade Nova de Lisboa, we began by recalling a large fire in a pine forest in Viana do Castelo, which was heading towards Monte de Santa Luzia fuelled by a ‘very strong, northerly wind’. This event marked his childhood in the 1930s. Between this time and the 1980s, when the 'geography of fire' was finally born, we look at the place of fire in the 1949 International Geographical Congress in Lisbon, its complementary or accidental role in the themes and frameworks that made up Portuguese geography in the middle of the last century (‘fire as a geographical event had very little importance’) and, the discovery, during the 1960s, of the use of fire as a key element of farming in various Portuguese colonial territories, where it was ‘customary to set fires, to make big queimadas in the style of the Alentejo’. In due course, she reminds us that in the great fires of the summer of 2003, whose collective memory has been submerged by the subsequent disasters of 2017, ‘many people died’.
The interview with João Filipe Bugalho, a forestry engineer and retired professor at the Instituto Superior de Agronomia, goes into great detail about the relationship between Portuguese forestry and the use of fire. His memoirs take us from his childhood and youth in the Alto Alentejo, where he doesn't remember any rural wildfires (although fire was always present), to his joining the Forestry Services at the end of his degree in the 1960s, when he began to take an interest in the subject of fire. Initially in charge of pioneering work on bird censuses, in the 1970s he would accompany visits to Portugal by some of the most renowned international experts in fire ecology, such as David Klein and Betty and Edwin Komarek. Until then, ‘fire was the number one enemy of foresters and fire was only talked about from the perspective of the wildfire’. The first experiments with prescribed burning in the Gerês National Park, carried out by foreign experts, would then help to impose a nuanced view of the use of fire among new generations of foresters, where, as he mentions, the names of Joaquim Moreira da Silva and Francisco Castro Rego stand out.
In the last interview in this series, with João Castro Caldas, agronomist and retired professor at the Instituto Superior de Agronomia, we go back in time through the north and centre of Portugal's rural interior to the middle of the 20th century, when ‘all the fuel was consumed by agricultural and pastoral communities’. From the school holidays spent between Lousã and Arcos de Valdevez, vivid memories emerge of the agricultural fires that every summer dotted the tops of the mountain ranges – and which no one bothered about – and the widespread manufacture of charcoal for domestic consumption. The pine forest was then a reserve of resources for people who lived in very difficult economic and social conditions. The depopulation of these territories goes hand in hand with the afforestation imposed by the Estado Novo and the occurrence of the first major fires in the 1960s, in a context in which ‘the forestry engineer had almost military power locally’. The conversation around the recent launch of the book A Casa e as Famílias: Entre Douro e Minho depois do Inquérito à Habitação Rural (1943), in which João Castro Caldas collaborates, allows us to return to the present and try to gauge for a moment what has really changed in these northern landscapes in the last eighty years, driven by emigration, democracy and tourism.
As a whole, these interviews – filmed and edited by director Luísa Homem – comprised real working sessions based on the collection and sharing of information, the lively discussion of working hypotheses and the development of research paths. Furthermore, the interviews shared here and the full recording of the sessions represent valuable oral sources for the history of fire in Portugal. Focusing on sciences that were engaged in examining and charting Portuguese territory, this series could naturally be continued through botany and ecology, with the aim of identifying the emergence of fire as an ecological factor in understanding Mediterranean biomes and, in the field of social sciences, through history and anthropology, considering the social history of the Portuguese countryside and the rich ethnology dedicated to collecting and systematising disappearing agricultural practices and techniques.
