The Burning Landscapes of the Serras of Southern Portugal: A Silent Transition from Fire-Centric Landscapes to Massive Forest Fires

Over the course of the 1960s, the Monchique mountains in southern Portugal moved from a cereal-based rural economy to one based on eucalyptus trees channelled into the pulpwood industry. This swift change entailed the transition from a landscape mostly organised around fire farming practices to a forested landscape frequently devastated by large fires. This article proposes a long-term understanding of these changes and, more broadly, of the emergence of the current fire regime in the Portuguese mountains, focusing on the political, scientific, and ecological opposition between forest and fire that unfolded from the second half of the nineteenth century. Monchique shows, paradoxically, that rural fire use long resisted the ideal of a fire-free landscape until the birth of the recent massive forest fires.