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The "Rocha do Oeste": the growing of a regional identity in the shade of pear orchards
| In the present transformation process of rural landscapes and activities, which may be termed as rurbanisation (Thomsin, 2001), and is an active part of the regionalization process in Europe, the case of the Rocha pear growing in the west coast of Portugal, may be considered a paradigmatic and revealing story.
Portugal is known by its extreme longevity as a centralised nation-state, and in accordance to this, by the weakness of its regional identities and the strength of the local ones. This situation renders the building and affirmation of territorial regional identities particularly difficult. Furthermore, the geographical space between the two big rivers, Douro (North) and Tejo (South) has played historically the role of an interface, between Christians and Muslims, between thick populated territory and vacant landscapes, between the deep rural world and the urban or urbanising spaces. Because of this interface character, the geographic region, from which the Oeste (West coast) is a part, never presented unity, nor centralised organization, and never had the feeling of its regional individuality. On the contrary, it was always more exploited then valued (Daveau, 1991).
It is in this context, that the raise of the systematic and coordinated growth of the “Pêra Rocha do Oeste”, due to the establishment of farmers associations in the ambit of the European Common Agricultural Politics, gave rise to a complex network of social actors and is transforming a fruit in the symbol of an henceforth newly valorised region.
The paper I want to present is the result of a case study in which people representing the various nodes of this, in the meantime complex becoming network, were interviewed. What results from their speech is a rich picture of the growth of a regional identity in the contradiction between national and local, between political and economical powers, between attraction for the quantity and the need to sustainability, between a long tradition of power distance and the desire to participation and citizenship.
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