On the rocky promontory that dominates “her” valley, Aida Fernandes opens her arms wide, as if to embrace the green hills facing her, where country roads wind their way. Nothing disturbs the silence that reigns over this idyllic landscape of groves. Not even the sound of long-horned cows, which we come across more often than men on the winding roads leading to Covas do Barroso, a hamlet of 180 souls in northern Portugal.
“We have nothing but this nature and, at the same time, we have everything we need, breathes this 43-year-old farmer, who raises, with her husband, twenty-six cows of the indigenous Barrosa breed, whose meat is renowned throughout the country. There are no shops, no cinema, but this landscape is priceless, as is the quality of the products of the land and the purity of the water in the rivers. With 500 euros, we live better than those who, in town, earn 1,500. But if the mine comes, we will lose everything and we will have to leave…”
While Serbia announced by surprise, on January 20, that it was putting an end to the lithium mining project along the Jadar river, in the west of the country, by the Anglo-Australian company Rio Tinto, after months of massive protests, Portugal is about to do the opposite. Lisbon could unblock in the coming weeks the project for the largest open-pit mine in Western Europe of this strategic ore, used in the manufacture of batteries for electric cars, on the sparsely inhabited lands of the Barroso region, classified as World Agricultural Heritage, 150 kilometers northeast of Porto.
The company Savannah Resources, based in London, has been working on the project since 2017. It obtained the exploration permit and has already carried out prospecting which has enabled it to identify deposits of spodumene, minerals very rich in lithium, containing nearly of 287,000 tons of the precious metal. Enough to produce the batteries for 500,000 electric vehicles per year for around ten years, thanks to a 542-hectare open-pit mine project, comprising four deep craters and a huge slag heap.
Six new areas
This British investment company still has to write the final version of the feasibility study, which must determine the profitability of the project, the cost of production being considerably higher than that of the brine evaporation ponds extracts lithium from Latin America, where the main world reserves are located. And it is only awaiting the opinion of the Portuguese authorities on the environmental impact study. The conclusions, imminent, were postponed after the early legislative elections, which took place on Sunday January 30 in Portugal.
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