About Cooperativa Integral Da Terra

We listen. We open up. We build together. We are people who chose this land, and it chose us back. We farm, we build, we teach, we restore — not as individuals scrambling for survival, but as a cooperative that shares risk, shares reward, and shares the work of staying in right relationship with the living world. Based across Lagos, Vila do Bispo, Monchique, Aljezur, and Odemira, Cooperativa Integral da Terra is a self-financed network that cuts bureaucracy so members can focus on what matters: growing food regeneratively, running a circular local economy, protecting forests, and nurturing community. We work closely with Pro Nativa and EcoInterventions to protect and restore southwest Portugal's unique landscape.

Country: 🇵🇹 Portugal

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Vale da Gema Headwaters: Regenerating and Moving through the Landscape

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There's a network of ridgelines above the Vale da Gema that most of our neighbors have never walked. From up there, you can see where the water comes from — and where it's been going wrong.

We are the Cooperativa Integral da Terra, a network of families, farmers, and land stewards spread across the western Algarve and southern Alentejo. For years we've been strengthening the local economy from below — sharing services, pooling resources, protecting forests. But recently we looked up and realized: the headwaters that feed all of this are drying out. And we know the people who can fix it.

That's why we formed the Vale da Gema Headwaters Consortium with Tamera and other partners. Tamera sits at the very top, proving every day that water retention landscapes work. Our job — the cooperative's job — is to get bodies moving through that landscape. To turn a watershed into a classroom. To make regeneration visible, social, and impossible to ignore.

What we'll do, over 18 months:

Host the Watershed Marathon & Walkathon — a yearly community event along a newly built tour track through the headwaters, where runners and walkers pass swales, retention ponds, and re-vegetated slopes, seeing with their own eyes how water comes back to dry land. Regional food, music, and connection turn it into a celebration, not a lecture.
Launch a public billboard campaign — bold, visible markers along the tour track explaining each intervention in plain language. Simple message: this exists. It works. Come be part of it.
Run a matching fund for regenerative interventions — surplus funding goes directly back into the land. We match 20-80% that each landowner invests into rewilding, invasive species control, native reforestation, water retention, or close-to-nature forestry on their property. This turns the campaign into a regenerative multiplier: money raised flows through the event and directly into the soil.

In two years, the marathon route won't just be a race course — it will be a living corridor of restored land that thousands of people have walked, learned from, and invested in. Neighbors who never spoke will have run together. Landowners who hesitated will have broken ground, backed by matching funds. And the cooperative will have proven that regeneration isn't just an ecological practice — it's a social one.

This is how we move through a watershed together: on foot, with open eyes, and with shovels ready.

Funding Goals (all values in €)