Nature just needs space to be. Nothing else. In everything else, she’s enough. When there is space, the seed is born, the fruit grows, and everything flows in its proper place. Exactly as it should be.
There is a place called “Matinha”, where this space exists with a question of being preserved. The only imposition is what Mother Nature orders. As the first housewife, she rules the roost. It calls summer to warm spring, and drops a blanket of leaves when the cold hits the earth. Everything happens in its own time, precisely because there is room for everything.
A tree needs to be unhindered so that it can stretch its branches. Grass will only stick to the ground if it is not walked on. Flowers only sprout where they are given time, without being touched. The ants follow in their wake, if nothing or no one gets in the way. The little birds snuggle up in the nest, when the trunk isn’t cut off at the root. Frogs only squawk in the lake if the rain doesn’t dry it out. The owl hoots at night because the moon ends the day, just as the cock crows later because the sun insists on waking up again. And we only remain people because everything else is.
Twenty-six years ago, when Alfredo, Mónica and Vicente’s feet first set foot on this land, it was all aridity and dryness. Ugly from the ground up, and with no potential to flourish in sight, the Matinha valley seemed a hopeless case. But it was with this complete disarray that Alfredo set foot on this land, after meeting love at first sight at the Herdade.
As a good family man, Alfredo gave his wife a “son” and his son a world. He overcame those who called him “crazy” and went ahead to buy the land with all the confidence it takes to have faith in what you can’t see.
It was in this state of inhospitable erosion that the Herdade da Matinha project was born. The beauty came with time, born in the heart of a family’s dream, and created by all the hands that came to help.
Today, Vicente’s feet are a good size up, Alfredo and Mónica have given him two more brothers, the land has planted thousands of trees, the flowers are much more than mothers, and an encyclopedia of species has come to live.
Time has passed, but some things have never changed: If you pay attention, you can find Alfredo’s feet walking around, from one place to another, everywhere. Unimposing, open to everything. He only sees with the eyes of feeling, knowing that it is by paying attention to nature that he ends up knowing, naturally, what it needs.
So it was precisely 26 years ago that life was created in this Alentejo universe, because these three souls arrived and came to believe. And never, in any of the days since that first one, have any of them wanted to do anything else that would derail them from the path that the Earth itself was taking them on.
It is in the same order that everyone who passes through respects the rules of the house. It is still with the same ideal, never spent despite having dreamed of so much, that the father of this family continues to take care of the space with the same zeal with which he raised each of his three children. With the notion that nothing is yours, but that it is in your hands to ensure that in every tiny corner there is immense potential to bring this ecosystem to life.
