The concept behind the project is for 12 graduates to start a one-year internship during which they’ll have to develop ideas meant to bring new life to the Praia do Barril beach concessions as part of the overall goal of fighting seasonality. The idea is to offer new tourism products and services aiming toward the senior and disabled citizens.

The idea man behind the project is Antonia Almeida Pires, the general manager of the Pedras d’el Rei resort; he invited the University of the Algarve to provide some academic backup and some institutional credibility to the venture.

The hope is that the project will have a positive effect on the region’s tourism industry during the low inter season, because Barril is indeed of regeneration, so the idea is to aim the project at seniors, a much more demanding market.

The interns will be the hands-on part of the approach, while the backing entities will be offering a background network meant to facilitate contacts with other entities, funding opportunities and providing their important know-how to the effort.

Around 200 University of the Algarve graduates applied for the 12 positions, so the organizers had quite the pool to choose from, and they were looking for a wide variety of fields of expertise, ranging from landscaping and management to things like marine biology and architecture.

Considering the one-year time span of the internship, during this time the interns will be staying at the Pedras d’el Rei development for free, and will be receiving a monthly wage of around 700 Euros – it’s quite a decent deal for fresh graduates.

We’ll have to keep an eye on this project this following year and see what comes of it.

According to a statement from the association, a large number of olive trees would be planted on a piece of land that is part of the REN National Ecological Reserve. This land in turn, is above the deepest part of one of the region’s largest underground water reserves – the Querenca-Silves aquifer.

The association’s concern is that the project is wrongly labeled as being ‘organic’ – considering the presumable use of agro-chemical products and intensive water consumption – and that it might also serve as guise for a tourism project that has been on hold in recent years.

The environmentalists fear that this might be a test-run for something else to follow, saying that land-clearing work has already begun but was stopped by GNR police when local property owners complained.

The association continued to make its case saying that the destruction of legally protected scrubland – especially where there are juniper shrubs present – as well as of landscape characteristic to rural Algarve is plain to see. They’ve also criticized the ‘ungracious’ attitude of those entities who allowed for the project to go ahead.

Despite the somewhat alarmist and arguable assumptions that the Almargem association makes, what it is asking for is for full clarification of the situation from the authorities in charge and for these same authorities to embargo the project as well as obliging the project’s promoter to replace things as they were before the land clearing started. Whilst there is really nothing wrong with the first request, the second one seems a bit of an overreach, but environmentally minded associations aren’t always the most reasonable of entities when it comes to protecting nature, so it doesn’t really come as a shock.