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| Read about the history of our Park, know what our goals are and take have a look around our premisses. |
The history of Monsanto Forest Park is closely related to the city of Lisbon.
Owing to its proximity to several watercourses, good fishing areas and fertile soils, the region of Monsanto was occupied by man since prehistory.
In the Metals age, people lived on agriculture, cattle raising, and they settled on the banks of the river Tagus, in the area where Lisbon sets today.
With the romans, Olisipo (name of Lisbon in former times), grew in terms of population. and the primitive forest was reduced. With the Mussulmans occupation the area gave place to olive tree plantations, kitchen gardens, wheat fields and even horse breeding.
The large number of wind mills, still existing at Serra de Monsanto (Monsanto Hills), is the response to the generalization of the cereals culture.
The Águas Livres Aqueduct, built by order of King D. João V in 1731, solved the problem of the lack of water and it unquestionably became a landscape mark.
The intensive agricultural usage of the soils led to the erosion and practically to the destruction of the original vegetation.
In the thirties, the increasing demand for construction areas led Duarte Pacheco, a Secretary of State for the Public Works, to recover an idea coming back from 1868: the reforesting of the then practically bare Serra de Monsanto.
The regulation for Monsanto Park occurs in 1934 and the works for replantation were carried out by farmers and prisoners from Monsanto Fort.
It was the architect Keil do Amaral who presented the first global project for the park, including leisure and sports areas, some of them still existing.
The Ecological Park has a privileged location at Monsanto Forest Park - the largest green patch in the city of Lisbon, with almost 1000 ha.
The Ecological Park of Lisbon, located at Monsanto Forest Park , is a meeting point for a new contact with the environment, right in the heart of the Portuguese capital.
Its main purpose is to make visitors sensitive to the many variables of the environment, for instance, geology, climate, flora, and fauna.
But, the most important is to understand the relations among the several elements and the role performed by man in this system, in a way to create a lasting, profitable relation with it.
The Park has a perimeter of four kilometres, a total area of fifty hectares, being almost sixteen a fenced area and thirty four hectares non-fenced.
It spreads over Serra de Monsanto, from Alto da Serafina to the Woods of S. Domingos de Benfica, passes the farm of Marquis de Fronteira and the Lead Shooting Club of Portugal.
The Ecological Park runs an Interpretation Centre, with an Auditorium, a Space for permanent and occasional Exhibitions, and a Centre of Multimedia Resources.
Monsanto Forest Park offers a well diversified tree-covered area. A large number of species were introduced in Serra de Monsanto during the reforesting period. Owing to climate and geological characteristics these originated very interesting ecosystems implanted in the urban patch of Lisbon ( and surrounding councils).
Following the paths at the Ecological Park, we can observe, both in an amusing and educational way, some of those species and the ecosystems which they support.
Our guided visit, starts in an area where the stone pine is the dominant species, creating climatic edaphologic conditions entirely different from the ones we observe in the areas where the genus "quercus", holm-oak and cork-oak, prevails.
It is interesting to find out how the ecological characteristics of these two vegetable formations differ as far as the characteristics of the soil, the light and the existing species from the inner strata are concerned.
After having crossed a grove of holm-oaks and cork-oaks, we approach an observatory from where we can see the lake and all the animal activity associated to it.
The humid spots are areas of great ecological and conservationist importance for the entire collection of species of the fauna existing in the park, creating the ideal conditions for the survival of a great number of them. At Serra de Monsanto, the existence of water in Summer depends on rigorous Winters (rainy) during which aquifers are recharged. For this reason, the lakes you are watching are not natural structures, but the result of an arrangement project enabling the existing conditions, once the brooks in the Park are classified as torrential regimes, remaining dry most part of the year.
A great majority of the animals you can watch are birds, although the ecosystems of the Park support many other fauna species, like insects, reptiles, amphibious and mammals.
Watching these species requires a great deal of patience and some knowledge. With most animals, it is important to pay attention to the marks they leave in the woods, such as galls, excrement, footmarks and nibbled pine cones.
This is actually one of the ways by which the presence of the squirrel, a species introduced into the Monsanto Florest Park in 1993, is becoming more and more evident.
Finishing this visit, we go through the deer enclosure, which allows us to understand how the ecosystems of the Ecological Park have, like any other natural systems, a limited support capacity, beyond which problems become very serious.
