It was the most beautiful house in the village…

1. A man exhausted and broken by the struggle against the cycle of fire, he refused to look at the brutal reality that invaded him through every sense, and told the journalist that it was the most beautiful house in the village, with its flowers, trees, nooks and crannies, and the coziness of the house during leisure and social hours. Emotion overcame him, and with his eyes lowered, he paused to speak, giving way to a silence of pain and profound sadness. A silence that occupied the destruction and emptiness of a life. Places that were swallowed by fire. Houses that were consumed in the blink of an eye by the flames. The memories of so many lives, now there, scattered amidst the black ashes of the fire, reminding us that a family had once lived there, their "relics" now transformed into black shards of suffering.

All those nooks and crannies, furniture, photographs, and household objects turned to dust, were the embodiment of a memory that mediated between lived time, past, and present. They functioned as narrative objects that prevented oblivion and sublimated the pain of departure, with the ritual symbolization of an absence lived in memory embodied in the objects that, from generation to generation, made up the domestic ecosystem—the memories of a family.

After the fire, there was emptiness, a painful absence, the recovery of the narrative that resorts to a before, to leap over the wreckage of the after. The search for the place that doesn't physically exist, but that can be remembered through the imagination that allows us to inhabit the absence. Looking at the floor consumed by the flames and drawing with your finger, here a bedroom, there the kitchen, the living room, with words tangled with pain, remains the silence of a sad and resigned gaze. The pain of absence that confronts us with the representation of non-presence. The relationship between the lived past and the remembered past that, in an instant, leads to the suspension of time-memory / time-lived. The clock had stopped at the exact moment the flames took all life.

The destruction of the place, the fields, the woods (oak, chestnut, cork oak, birch), the yards, the animals, the vegetable gardens, the vineyards, the houses, and the porches is undoubtedly an event of great psychological violence because it confronts us with the irreparable loss of lived time. It also refers to the displacement of the loss of physical and material, symbolic and spiritual memory. Memory is no longer a celebration, but rather forgetting as a ritualization of the suffering of loss through the destruction of fire. We are faced with what Halbwachs (1987) classified as traumatic memories, associated with psychoanalytic experiences where remembering is symptomatically linked to the ghosts of present tragedy and incessant pain.

The past memory suffers a serious accident. It calls into question the relationship between identity and local memory, and remembrance and foundational accounts lose their ability to assert fidelity to memory and history.

There is always the possibility of remembering. But remembering caused by the violence of destruction is not remembering for the sake of creating memory, but the only way to access a memory wounded by the pain and desolation of the fire that blocks our imagination and summons us to a therapeutic forgetting.

This man, a native of Vila Viçosa, in the municipality of Arouca, poetically and truthfully conveyed the pain that grips his chest and brings tears to his eyes when tragedy knocks on the door and takes our entire lives. A life made up of a long, eventful time, of desires and stubbornness. It was this intangible life that was lost and can never be rebuilt.

2. We will need a long time to reclaim this tragedy, the creative retrospective that will restore our memory and the event. Politicians will need to take the right measures seriously and coherently, at the right time, which is our time. We will need to make simple plans committed to all those who were victims of the tree of fire. Together, we will summon knowledge and energy, resources and resources, and together we will rebuild what is possible and create what the future demands of us. Without haste, without amateurism, without political demagoguery. Never abandon those who have lost everything, or almost everything; they need public authorities to be supportive and responsible, close to them, and active.

We must learn from these fires. We cannot remain confined to fighting fires. We must take advantage of these fires to reorganize our villages, our mountains, and plateaus—to give a new anthropological meaning to the territory. This requires courage and political determination; we cannot stand by and watch this tragedy unfold without intervening or making decisions. This is the time to make the necessary decisions, bringing together everyone and everything in a broad commitment to defending our lives and the future of our territories. We must find another way of life and another mode of economic organization for our towns, villages, and communities.

Given the magnitude of the tragedy, it is necessary to implement a contractual agenda for local development that involves all residents and their respective institutions and active forces, summoning the critical mass and the necessary expertise, in a research-action-participation process, using participatory and collaborative methodologies. Community involvement throughout the process guarantees success in solving the problem. We must bring everyone together without exception, on the basis of popular democracy, opening the discussion, engaging and committing. Solutions to the problem must originate from the community to the decision-making bodies and never be imposed from above. We must democratize and legitimize decision-making and the development of solutions. Vertical and bureaucratic models have not yielded results; they are expensive, waste hundreds of millions of euros, and are cold and distant from the people and the problems. In Lisbon and Brussels, solutions are rare and generally ungrateful to those who depend on the territory. Investing in increased prevention resources isn't the solution; it's postponing the solution by spending ever more millions without preventing the tragedy of wildfires. The tragedy proves us right.

The solution is uniquely political and national. It involves an agenda for the development of local/rural/mountain economies, focusing on the endogenous economy, dependent on local and environmental resources. This is coupled with a policy of repopulating the interior, with the displacement of human and material resources, and a return to the local economy. Valuing and encouraging organic farming, resilient and sustainable forests, and a system that energizes social and cultural life around dense and balanced communities. Rebuilding local state institutions that were dismantled in favor of a minimal state, leaving the market to regulate and speculate, destroy, and devalue low-density territories. The results are clearly reflected in the fire forest.

A program to dismantle evasive forest monocultures, such as eucalyptus. With policies to value and conserve water and its sources. An appreciation for pastoral communities, with the return of native livestock to the mountains and plateaus. Prevent local areas (rural/mountain/valley) from being captured by monoculture tourism and extractive economies. Pay particular attention to polluting sources from domestic and business sources, mines, landfills, etc. Promote a policy to remove all polluting sources. Requalify community life, strengthening societal bonds of proximity and solidarity. Enabling a greater humanization of social, economic, and cultural life.