Olive green in Alentejo

After a few years without visiting Beja, the return was full of disappointment. The surroundings of the city were not composed with fields of flowers, cereals and oaks anymore but with monocultures of olive trees with no underground vegetation, no birds and no flowers. The new land use changed the local climate, which became foggier and with grey sky as a constant. The city smelled like cheap olive oil. In the middle of the huge olive tree plantations, an artificial beach was created as a present, I believe, to keep locals happy and quiet about the change that brought an ugly landscape, bad smell, air pollution and lack of biodiversity. I could easily imagine the runoff of pesticides and herbicides into the waters of this beach and into the freshwater streams, or these being carried in the air. It was depressive. These infinite fields of olive tree monocultures arrived after the availability of water for irrigation provided by the Alqueva dam. This was seen as the engine of economic development of the Alentejo but instead it brought pollution, biodiversity loss, Asian migrants and simpathy for the extreme right wing party. I love olive oil but I would rather give up eating olive oil than contributing for such environmental, health and social disasters. In the past traditional olive orchards, with 100s of years, balanced olive oil production with biodiversity, but this balance is now lost.