Travel 2 Care
Are you familiar with the concepts of regenerative tourism or rewilding? Me neither. Well, not until I started working with entities like the Faia Brava nature reserve, Biosphere Portugal and Rewilding Portugal as part of this quest to make my trips as eco-friendly as possible. When I started running these trips, I knew these would have an impact, so I had to mitigate this and start a journey towards carbon-neutrality and do something good for the community. I happened to have an old pine woodland in the family, which was on the verge of abandonment, so one day I though “why not rewild it and use it as part of this strategy”? This was the beginning of this personal journey called “Travel 2 Care”…
Rewilding an old woodland
One of the main concepts of rewilding is to let Nature lead the way, so ever since I started Dream Overland back in 2011, I have been giving mother nature a hand by clearing dead pine trees to make way for new oaks and other native trees. To complement this, a few years ago I started planting a new tree for every individual customer coming on my trips, which I continue to do up to this day.
The first signs of recovery are already showing up with lots of new oaks, chestnut, cork and other autochthonous trees growing on what was once a monoculture of pine trees. Along with the new trees came the birds and the wild flowers, some of which I had never seen before in the area, and now even dragonflies and frogs appear in the small ponds.
This 14-year effort makes me very proud for being the first (if not the only) tour company on the market to have this approach to regenerative tourism and a leading position in nature conservation. So, who said travelling overland is incompatible with protecting mother nature?
#travel2care
www.biospheresustainable.com/en/community/dream-overland/4731