Tamera

What is Tamera?

Tamera is a place where a dry landscape was given back its water. In the Alentejo, in southern Portugal, near the village of Relíquias in the municipality of Odemira, a living and research community has been reshaping its land since 2007 so that the winter rain no longer runs off but stays. The result, a water retention landscape of lakes, swales and terraces, has become one of the best-documented examples of its kind in southern Europe.

The community was founded in 1995 by a group of about 30 people from Germany; today around 200 people live there, according to The Water Network. It sees itself as a place of research into sustainable ways of living. On this page we look at its work with water, which has made Tamera a place of learning for many people who work on dry land.

Its history

When the ecologist Bernd Müller came to Tamera in 2006, he found a land typical of the region: in summer the hills looked almost like a desert, trees were dying and wells were running dry. In winter the heavy rain flooded across the ground and ran off instead of soaking in. The Alentejo receives on average roughly 600 to 700 millimetres of rain a year, depending on the source, but almost all of it falls in the cool months.

The answer was developed together with the Austrian farmer Sepp Holzer, who worked closely with Tamera on the approach. In August 2007 work on the landscape began, and the first lake, Lake 1 at the centre of the site, was built that year on Holzer's proposal. According to Müller, a new spring appeared at the edge of the land in February 2008.

The idea

The principle is simple: rain should stay where it falls. Tamera describes the pattern of the region, with heavy winter rains, floods and streams that dry up in summer, as a half water cycle. To make it whole again, the water has to be held in the land, so that it can soak in, recharge the groundwater and come back up in springs.

Bernd Müller summed up the method in three steps. In his words: "slow it down, spread it over the land and let it sink." The retention spaces are held back by dams of natural material and are not sealed with concrete or plastic sheeting, so that the water slowly seeps into the ground. Around them come swales along the contour, terraces, deep ploughing along keylines, reforestation, organic farming and planned grazing. The aim is that no rainwater runs off the land unused; it is meant to soak in where it falls.

The work

According to the European Climate-ADAPT case study, whose content comes from Tamera itself, the water retention landscape was designed and built between 2006 and 2015 on 154 hectares. In that time, 29 lakes and retention spaces were created, from small ponds to lakes. In 2011 a retention space with roughly three times the capacity of the first lake was added. The area of water bodies grew from 0.62 hectares in 2006 to about 8.32 hectares.

In 2012 the project received an honourable mention in the Buckminster Fuller Challenge in the categories of environment and energy and water and sanitation.

What became of it

The results reported by Tamera and the case study are remarkable. A new seepage spring appeared within the first year after the first lake was built and has flowed continuously since. Since 2011 the community has supplied all its drinking water from wells fed by the landscape. Transitional woodland, mostly on former grassland, grew from 9.34 to 19.50 hectares, and carbon storage rose by 9.4 percent a year between 2006 and 2014, according to the case study.

The case study is also frank about the economics. It puts the investment for such a landscape in the order of half a million euros, financed from private funds and donations. Its cost-benefit calculation for 2015 to 2050, which counts income from visits and events and a higher land value, comes out negative; many benefits, for biodiversity, water quality, groundwater and harvests among them, could not be reliably expressed in money. That, too, is a valuable lesson: such landscapes are an investment in the land, not a business model. According to The Water Network, Bernd Müller has since advised water projects in many countries, from Jordan and Kenya to Brazil and Colombia.

What we learn from Tamera

Terra Humana shares Tamera's core idea: water belongs in the land, not in the gully. On a dry Mediterranean slope, keeping the winter rain is the first condition for everything else, for soil, trees and springs. Tamera has shown on a large scale what this can mean, and it has documented its work so that others can learn from it.

We take the principle, not the scale. Sa Medada is steep, and its summer is long, hot and dry. That is why we begin with the soil, with ground cover, rainwater harvesting along the contour and swales, and consider open water only where the site and the water balance allow it. A retention pond is a second step, not the first. From Tamera we also take patience and openness: a landscape like this grows over years, and it gains its value when its experience is shared.