Portugal is home to the largest cork forest on Earth. A single estate just outside Lisbon holds more of it, under one owner, than anywhere else in the world; the size of Washington DC. Trees whose bark won’t be ready to harvest for fifty years.
The land around it is one of roughly three dozen places on the planet ecologists call a biodiversity hotspot. In this episode, Steve Mokaya goes inside Companhia das Lezírias, 18,000 hectares of man-made ecosystem, with biologist Sandra Alcobia, to decode what this land demands of the people who run it.
There’s a lot interesting facts in this biodiversity concurcopia. A horse worth over a million euros that’s never once allowed to mate on its own. Cork peeled like fruit, and left alone for half a century after. Tree roots that share water with each other underground. And a squirrel extinct here for five hundred years, just returned back.
Some of what gets planted here will never be harvested by the people planting it, but by a grandson they’ll never meet.
Editor’s Note: This podcast was originally published on The Nature Trail Podcast.
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