Projeto Portugal 2020

Deruralisation in Portugal is a process whose roots can be traced back at least to the 1960s (Silva, 2009: 35) and, since then, rural development policies have tended to concentrate less on agriculture and progressively more on rural economic activities - in particular tourism. Increasingly, public funds have been invested in projects that aimed not only to slow down demographic decline in rural areas, but also to stimulate a functional and, indeed, symbolic reorrientation of the Portuguese countryside. With regard to such publicly-guided processes of rurally-focused multifunctional diversification and reorientation, the case of the NUT III Douro (hereafter referred to simply as “the Douro”) is paradigmatic. The Douro, located in the North Interior of Portugal and comprising 19 counties (conselhos) is endowed with a exceptional combination of endogenous resources: its boasts the oldest demarcated wine area in the world; a significant hydrographic basin based on the River Douro and its