The Portuguese blue dragon is alive and is a monstrous sight to behold. The Earth offers unexpected views. Nature surprises with curves and fractal geometries, and the human hand draws straight lines to the side that stand out among the organic forms of nature.
Dragons are present in a multitude of cultures: sometimes representing optimistic values, others as bad omens, in the case of Portugal the visit of Chinese culture is no coincidence since the Odeleite River is considered a symbol of fortune, wisdom, power, or abundance thanks to its blue dragon form.
Odeleite River, the Blue Dragon of Portugal
It is not a particularly long river, just 99 kilometers. Where its popularity lies is in the shape it takes, especially if we contemplate its channel from a certain height. And there is no legend behind this, it’s just that they are nature’s antics and now they have been captured from space. The International Space Station showed images of the blue dragon in Portugal and as you already realized, it is not a dragon like what we know in stories. Still, rather it is a river in the Portuguese municipality of Castro Marim, in the Algarve.
The Odeleite River reservoir was built a long time ago and as it passes between cliffs you can see it as if it were a dragon. Still, no one had noticed this until a photographer named Steve Richards who is originally from New Zealand took an image with this angle from a plane in 2010 and until the space station verified it. The shape that the tail of the swamp adopts as it crosses the hills of this Portuguese region that faces the Atlantic acquires when seen from above, the unmistakable image of a Chinese dragon in vertical foreshortening.
From the Spectacular to the Harsh Reality
The interior of the Algarve is a region that is naturally rich in vegetation, which thrives influenced by winds loaded with oceanic humidity. But forestry policy and the monoculture of pine and eucalyptus trees, the latter for the paper industry, have turned the land into a tinderbox.
For decades, the Portuguese region has suffered the scourge of devastating fires, which have left bare slopes on the once green hills where oak and cork oak forests thrived and shady riverbanks populated by endemic species of Iberia such as the parrot or the ojaranzo, fossil plants. relicts from the Tertiary and that love heat and humidity. On that tapestry of ocher colors and scorched earth, the brilliant water dragon of the Odeleite River is now drawn.
This story was written in Spanish by Perla Vallejo in Ecoosfera.
