Listening to the mountain: oral history, biocultural heritage, and sustainability transitions in Serra da Estrela

This article draws on a corpus of oral history interviews collected in Serra da Estrela, Portugal, to examine how community memory, territorial knowledge, and lived relationships with the mountain contribute to understanding socio-ecological change and rethinking sustainability in a context of climate disruption. Focusing on territory already recognized as a UNESCO Global Geopark and currently proposed for inscription as a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve, the study explores how oral testimony illuminates the biocultural dimensions of sustainability and the contribution of the Social Sciences and Humanities to sustainability transitions. The research adopts a qualitative, interpretive, and place-based design grounded in the Memory for All methodology and combines documentary analysis with oral history interviews addressing everyday life, pastoral activity, environmental perception, territorial change, and intergenerational transmission of knowledge. The results show that the interviews consistently converge around a set of major themes: the decline of pastoralism, demographic contraction, changing climatic conditions, wildfires, institutional inadequacy, and the reconfiguration of local economies. They also reveal Serra da Estrela as a lived socio-ecological system in which ecological processes, labor, memory, and identity remain deeply entangled. Particular attention is given to transhumance, analyzed through both historical literature and interview-based testimony as a practice that links mobility, adaptation, ecological knowledge, and cultural memory, while also acquiring renewed relevance in contemporary debates on biodiversity, fuel-load management, and regenerative territorial practices. The article argues that oral history enlarges the epistemic field of sustainability research by making audible forms of knowledge and experiences that remain only partially translated into technical and policy-oriented approaches. In doing so, it shows how methods grounded in the Social Sciences and Humanities can help reframe sustainability transitions as processes of cultural and epistemic transformation and contribute to more inclusive, territorially grounded, and socially meaningful pathways toward sustainable and circular societies. The findings also provide practical insights for policymakers, protected-area managers, and local stakeholders seeking to integrate community knowledge and biocultural heritage into sustainability transitions.

This article draws on a collection of oral history interviews gathered in Serra da Estrela, Portugal, to show how community memories, territorial knowledge, and lived relationships with the mountain contribute to understanding socio-ecological change and to rethinking sustainability in a time of climate disruption. By examining how people narrate their links to landscape, work, mobility, environmental change, and local forms of care, the article argues that oral history offers a particularly valuable way of understanding how communities perceive, inhabit, and act within their territories. By bringing these voices into the analysis, the article demonstrates how oral history can deepen the understanding of sustainability, climate change, and territorial transformation, while also showing why the Social Sciences and Humanities (SSH) are essential to sustainability transitions. These fields make it possible to grasp the cultural, historical, and epistemic dimensions through which environmental challenges are experienced, interpreted, and transformed into socially meaningful forms of knowledge and action. It further shows how approaches grounded in SSH can help reframe sustainability transitions as processes of cultural and epistemic change, opening space for more regenerative, inclusive, and territorially grounded ways of imagining and enacting the future.

The transition toward sustainable societies requires changes in how people relate to nature, value local knowledge, and understand the cultural foundations of sustainability. It also calls for a reorientation of values, practices, and collective imaginaries capable of reconnecting ecological responsibility with lived experience, territorial memory, and forms of care embedded in everyday life. This is where the SSH acquire particular relevance. Their contribution lies in clarifying the assumptions that underpin dominant models of development; in examining the values and hierarchies through which environmental problems are framed, the institutional settings through which knowledge becomes authoritative, the cultural narratives that shape public attitudes, and the ethical and political horizons within which transformation is made thinkable and legitimate; and in showing how climate and sustainability agendas are mediated by institutions, inequalities, cultural imaginaries, and forms of public legitimacy.

Furthermore, effective transformation depends on addressing the assumptions that continue to structure environmental action, including inherited notions of human dominance over nature, the overvaluation of technological solutions in isolation, short-term economic rationalities, and governance models that marginalize broader notions of wellbeing, justice, and long-term sustainability.

Seen from this perspective, sustainability transitions are not only material or institutional processes. They are also epistemic, cultural, and moral processes. Contemporary debates on sustainability and circularity have generated important work on technological innovation, planning strategies, resource management, and institutional design. Yet the deeper challenge concerns the frameworks of meaning through which transition becomes historically grounded, socially intelligible, and publicly actionable. Questions of legitimacy, participation, responsibility, attachment, and intergenerational transmission are not secondary to transformation; they are among its conditions. Climate and sustainability governance depend on more than data, models, or regulation. They also depend on how evidence is interpreted, how expertise is hierarchized, how institutions mediate competing values, and how societies imagine viable futures under conditions of ecological instability.

Mountain territories bring these issues into especially sharp focus. Their ecological singularity, climatic sensitivity, and long histories of human adaptation make them highly revealing sites for examining how environmental change is lived, interpreted, and negotiated. In such territories, sustainability is inseparable from accumulated experience: knowledge of altitude, water, pasture dynamics, seasonal rhythms, mobility, exposure, scarcity, and adjustment to variable ecological conditions. Mountain landscapes therefore demand to be approached not simply as environmentally valuable settings, but as socio-ecological formations shaped through enduring interactions among ecological processes, livelihoods, cultural practices, and memory. They also offer a privileged vantage point from which to examine how communities have historically developed practices of adaptation, restraint, stewardship, and negotiated use of resources—practices that can illuminate contemporary debates on resilience, regeneration, and the transformation of mind-sets.

Serra da Estrela, in Portugal, offers a particularly compelling case. As the highest mountain massif in mainland Portugal, it combines high-altitude ecosystems, marked geomorphological distinctiveness, pastoral and agro-silvo-pastoral traditions, and a long history of human occupation, making it an especially fertile setting for examining how sustainability in mountain regions depends on the interplay among environmental processes, cultural practices, and community life, and for exploring how community-based knowledge can support more inclusive and territorially meaningful approaches to transition.

Such a setting also calls for analytical approaches capable of engaging dimensions of territorial life that remain only partially visible in technical assessments or policy-driven conservation frameworks. Oral history is especially consequential in this regard (Hussey and Thompson, 2001). It gives access to situated, embodied, and relational forms of knowledge carried through memory, narrative, work, movement, and intergenerational transmission (Thompson, 2000). Oral testimonies illuminate how communities remember landscape change, interpret environmental variability, encode ecological observation in local vocabularies and practices (Maffi, 1999, 2001, 2005), and articulate forms of belonging, loss, continuity, and care (Endres, 2011; Rollo, 2025a,b). They also register the lived textures of adaptation: how people learned to read weather, water, vegetation, grazing conditions, and seasonal rhythms (Slim and Thompson, 1993; Williams and Riley, 2020); how they navigated hardship and change; and how they made sense of the mountain as a space of labor, identity, attachment, and responsibility. Oral history therefore contributes with more than additional empirical material; it offers a distinct epistemic perspective on socio-ecological systems. It also provides a way of widening participation in sustainability debates by making room for voices, experiences, and forms of territorial intelligence that are often underrepresented in formal planning and governance processes.

This argument becomes stronger when approached through the concept of biocultural heritage (Posey, 1999; Rotherham, 2015a; Agnoletti and Emanueli, 2016; Bridgewater et al., 2007; Bridgewater and Rotherham, 2019). Biocultural heritage provides a framework for understanding the long-term entanglement of ecological systems, cultural practices, local knowledge, and shared historical experience. Rather than separating nature from culture, it directs attention to their co-evolution and to the ways landscapes are shaped through sustained interactions between communities and ecosystems (Chapin et al., 2010; Díaz et al., 2011; Bobiec et al., 2025). Within this perspective, memory is not supplementary to sustainability or conservation. It is part of the cultural infrastructure through which communities interpret environmental change, sustain relationships with place, and transmit knowledge and values across generations (Rotherham, 2015b). Recent work on Biosphere Reserves and ecologies of memory (Rollo, 2025b) further develops this argument: oral narratives preserve ecological understanding, historical continuity, ethical orientations, and local forms of territorial intelligence, while also supporting participation, stewardship, and more grounded approaches to governance. In this sense, this perspective offers more than an interpretive category; it helps identify the cultural and ecological continuities through which more regenerative and less extractive relations with territory may be understood and renewed. In this respect, transhumance is especially revealing because it exemplifies living biocultural heritage: a still-meaningful ensemble of mobility, ecological knowledge, social practice, and cultural memory whose value lies not only in its past significance but in its continued relevance for territorial life (Moreno-Medina et al., 2026).

Oral history matters because it preserves traces of past experience and helps make visible forms of knowledge and value that often remain weakly translated into the language of indicators, planning instruments, or conservation policy. In many territories, biocultural heritage persists in implicit, informal, and everyday forms, without adequate recognition in formal governance frameworks (Bindi et al., 2022; Bhati and Epstein, 2023). Yet it is precisely this lived and accumulated knowledge that often underpins the legitimacy, coherence, and adaptive capacity of socio-ecological systems.

Drawing on oral testimonies collected through the Memory for All framework (Rollo, 2020, 2021), this article examines how mountain communities in Serra da Estrela narrate their relationships with landscape, work, seasonal practices, environmental change, and territorial belonging, and how these narratives contribute to understanding the mountain’s biocultural heritage. It asks, first, how oral testimonies reveal historically rooted relationships between communities and the mountain environment; second, how oral history helps identify and interpret the biocultural heritage of a mountain territory in transition; and third, how the themes that emerge most strongly in the interviews illuminate broader questions of ecological knowledge, adaptation, stewardship, and the role of SSH in sustainability transformation. More broadly, the article asks how an oral history approach can contribute to shifting the terms in which sustainability is understood – from predominantly technical and managerial formulations toward more relational, culturally grounded, and socially meaningful perspectives.

Within this broader field, transhumance appears as one particularly significant theme. Transhumance should be understood as a broader mobility-centered agro-pastoral system involving seasonal herd movement, routes, temporary residence, pastoral infrastructure, household organization, and practical knowledge. The oral corpus and the lived reality it documents extend well beyond any single practice. They concern the mountain as a whole: its environments, livelihoods, movements, social worlds, and changing relationships between people and nature. At the same time, transhumance acquires particular analytical value because it condenses many of the dimensions at stake in this study. It brings together seasonal mobility, pasture knowledge, adaptation to altitude and climate, links between mountain and lowland territories, and the historical shaping of cultural landscapes. It therefore emerges in this article as a dense expression of Serra da Estrela’s biocultural heritage within a wider matrix of mountain memory and socio-ecological relations. As such, it helps illuminate how situated practices and memories can challenge linear understandings of territorial use and point toward more cyclical, adaptive, and regenerative relationships with landscape.

By addressing these questions, the article seeks to contribute to current debates on the role of SSH in sustainability transitions. Its central claim is that oral history does more than preserve memory: it enlarges the epistemic field of sustainability research by making audible forms of knowledge, attachment, and environmental understanding that are indispensable for socially grounded and culturally meaningful transformation. In Serra da Estrela, community narratives show that sustainability in mountain regions is shaped through memory, practice, and intergenerationally transmitted relationships with territory. Listening to those voices helps reposition conservation, circularity, and resilience within a broader and more demanding understanding of transition—one that takes seriously the need to transform mind-sets, value situated knowledge and create more inclusive pathways toward sustainable and regenerative futures.

Research design

This study adopts a qualitative, interpretive, and place-based research design centered on oral history. Its aim is to examine how oral testimonies contribute to understanding Serra da Estrela as a mountain socio-ecological territory and how they illuminate the biocultural dimensions of sustainability in a context marked by ecological singularity and contemporary transformation. Oral narratives are approached as situated sources of knowledge that allow the analysis to consider how communities interpret environmental change, transmit ecological understanding, and articulate meanings of territory, loss, continuity, and responsibility. This design is particularly relevant in UNESCO-recognized or candidate territories, where sustainability depends on the articulation between scientific expertise, governance instruments, lived experience, local memory, and culturally embedded knowledge.

Study area

The study area focuses on Serra da Estrela in central Portugal, a mountain territory distinguished by altitude, ecological and climatic heterogeneity, geomorphological significance, and long-term human occupation. According to the 2021 census, approximately 130,000 people resided in this region, with the population being predominantly concentrated in the main urban centers of Celorico da Beira, Covilhã, Gouveia, Guarda, Manteigas and Seia. Rising to 1,993 m above sea level, Serra da Estrela is the highest mountain range in mainland Portugal. Its pronounced altitudinal gradient, complex topography, and exposure to Atlantic and Mediterranean climatic influences create a marked ecological and climatic diversity, reflected in a mosaic of habitats, seasonal environmental conditions, and land-use practices. The area is already recognized as a UNESCO Global Geopark and is currently proposed for inscription as a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve. The candidacy dossier frames Serra da Estrela as a living mountain territory in which natural heritage, geological heritage, cultural practices, local livelihoods, education, and community participation are deeply interconnected (AGE—Associação Geopark Estrela and CFE—Centro de Ecologia Funcional da Universidade de Coimbra, 2025). It proposes an approach in which conservation, sustainable development, and governance are understood as mutually reinforcing dimensions of the same territorial system.

This mountain context is central to the article’s analytical perspective. Serra da Estrela is approached as a socio-ecological system historically shaped through the interaction of ecological conditions and human practice. Seasonal rhythms, altitude, climate variability, pastoral activity, water use, mobility, and land management have long structured everyday life in the mountain. These dynamics are especially relevant for understanding mountain sustainability, where resilience and vulnerability coexist and where local knowledge often reflects generations of close attention to environmental conditions.

Sources and materials

The study draws on two main sets of materials. The first consists of documentary and bibliographic sources used to frame the historical, territorial, and environmental context of Serra da Estrela. These include the UNESCO Biosphere Reserve candidacy dossier and the literature on mountain landscapes, pastoralism, seasonal mobility, and cultural practices in the region.

The second, and principal, set of materials consists of a corpus of 19 oral history interviews conducted in October 2025 and collected under the methodological framework of Memory for All (Rollo, 2020, 2021, 2025b). The oral corpus used in this study addresses Serra da Estrela in a broad sense, rather than focusing exclusively on a single practice or occupational group. The interviews include memories of everyday life, pastoral activities, seasonal rhythms, environmental perception, local knowledge, territorial change, forms of attachment to the mountain, and the transmission of practices and values across generations. Specific details regarding the final interview sample, including the number of interviews analyzed, the criteria for selection, and the profile of interviewees, are presented in Section 3.1.

In addition, the citation and referencing oral history interviews in this article follow Frontiers’ editorial guidelines. Interviews are cited in the text and documented in the corresponding notes, while the complete oral history collection and associated metadata are accessible through the repository indicated in the Data Availability Statement.

Oral history framework

The oral history component of the research follows the methodological model developed within Memory for All, an interdisciplinary framework that combines oral history, archival practice, digital humanities, and participatory research. This methodology is based on rigorous preparation, contextual research, semi-structured interviewing, metadata production, digital preservation, and long-term public accessibility. Its purpose is to ensure that oral narratives are documented, interpreted, archived, and made available in ways that respect both scholarly standards and community relevance. Previous work developed within this framework has shown its suitability for the study of biocultural heritage, environmental memory, and community knowledge in UNESCO-designated and sustainability-oriented territories.

Within this model, interviews are preceded by documentary and territorial research intended to identify the main historical, ecological, and cultural dimensions of the area under study. This preparatory stage is essential for framing interview guides, selecting relevant themes, and situating personal testimony within wider territorial processes. In the case of Serra da Estrela, this preparation involved close attention to the mountain’s environmental characteristics, pastoral and rural practices, UNESCO framing, and the historical significance of mobility, seasonal use, and human interaction with altitude and landscape.

Interview approach and thematic scope

The interviews follow a semi-structured format. This provides a stable thematic orientation while preserving the openness required for memory to unfold through association, narrative sequence, and lived experience. Such flexibility is particularly important when dealing with environmental memory and place-based knowledge, since these are often embodied, cumulative, and embedded in everyday practice rather than formal classification. The interviews were designed to capture not only factual recollections but also perceptions, attachments, emotions, values, and interpretations associated with the mountain territory.

Their thematic scope reflects the wider orientation of the article. Topics include everyday life in the mountain, work and livelihoods, pastoral and agricultural practices, seasonal rhythms, experiences of weather and landscape, memories of environmental change, knowledge of local resources, community life, and perceptions of continuity, loss, and territorial transformation. Within this broad field, certain themes recur with particular density. Among them is transhumance, which appears in the interviews as a meaningful site where several dimensions converge: mobility, pastoral knowledge, adaptation to climatic and altitudinal conditions, connections between different territories, and the making of cultural landscapes. It is therefore treated as an important analytical theme emerging from the corpus rather than as its exclusive organizing frame.

Analytical strategy

The analysis follows a qualitative and interpretive strategy centered on thematic reading and contextual triangulation. Rather than aiming for statistical representativeness, it seeks to identify recurrent themes, narrative patterns, forms of ecological knowledge, and expressions of meaning through which interviewees narrate their relationship with the mountain. The analysis is guided by five main dimensions: lived relations with the mountain environment; ecological and seasonal knowledge; narratives of landscape change and territorial transformation; expressions of belonging, identity, and attachment; and memories of practices that illuminate the biocultural heritage of the territory. References to transhumance are examined within and across these dimensions, not as an isolated category but as a particularly dense point of convergence.

Within the Memory for All framework, analysis extends beyond the textual content of interviews. Testimonies are listened to in full and undergo a detailed process of time-coded indexing, thematic characterization, and contextual documentation. The identification of the principal analytical themes is grounded in this process and does not rely solely on textual occurrence or frequency. Rather, it results from the convergence between issues recurrently mobilized by interviewees, their significance within the narratives themselves, and their relevance for understanding the historical, environmental, cultural, and socio-ecological dynamics of the territory under study. Analytical categories thus emerge through an iterative dialogue between oral testimony, documentary and territorial knowledge, and the research questions guiding the investigation.

Analytically, the study combines close reading of testimonies with contextual interpretation. Individual narratives are examined both for their singularity and for the ways they resonate with recurring themes across the corpus. The oral narratives are then interpreted in dialogue with the historical and territorial literature and with the contemporary institutional framing of Serra da Estrela as a UNESCO-recognized and sustainability-oriented territory. This triangulation serves two purposes. First, it situates oral testimony within longer-term socio-ecological processes. Second, it allows the study to treat oral history as a source of situated knowledge capable of complementing documentary, historical, and policy-oriented approaches. In this sense, the method reflects the article’s broader argument: oral history contributes substantively to sustainability research by revealing dimensions of memory, experience, and territorial knowledge that are otherwise difficult to apprehend.

Ethical and archival considerations

Because oral history deals with personal narratives, identity, memory, and often with experiences of social and environmental change, ethical responsibility is central to the research process. The study follows the ethical principles embedded in the Memory for All methodology, including informed participation, contextual documentation, careful recording and processing of interviews, and responsible curation. Oral history is approached not as simple data extraction but as a research relationship grounded in trust, reciprocity, and respect for the people whose lives and memories are being documented.

In accordance with the Memory for All framework, all interviews were conducted only after the project, its objectives, and its ethical conditions had been clearly presented to participants and, whenever relevant to the communities involved. Interviewees provided informed authorization for recording, preservation, analytical use, and public dissemination of their testimonies through a standardized consent procedure combining oral explanation and written declaration. This authorization explicitly covered the storage, treatment, archiving, and public accessibility of the interviews within the Memory for All digital infrastructure. No interview was published, made publicly available, or used for research purposes without prior informed consent and formal authorization. These procedures are integral to the methodological model publicly presented by the Memory for All platform and are consistently applied across its oral history projects.

The archival dimension is also fundamental. One of the distinctive features of the Memory for All framework is its commitment to the long-term preservation, organization, and accessibility of oral history materials through structured digital infrastructures. This is especially important in research on biocultural heritage, where the value of testimony lies not only in its immediate analytical use but also in its continued availability for future research, public history, education, and community engagement. In the context of Serra da Estrela, where memory, heritage, and governance are closely related, this archival commitment forms part of the study’s broader contribution. Accordingly, all interviews underwent a careful process of editing, cataloguing, indexing and digital preservation. The final versions are publicly accessible through the project Memories of Serra da Estrela on the Memory for All website. Each interview includes detailed time-coded indexing to facilitate navigation and retrieval. Interviews were also indexed according to thematic categories, enabling easier searchability and cross-referencing across the archive. In addition, biographical notes were prepared for each interviewee, together with a brief synopsis summarizing the main themes and narratives emerging from each interview.

Scope and limitations

This article does not seek to offer an exhaustive historical reconstruction of Serra da Estrela, nor a comprehensive ethnography of mountain pastoralism. Its purpose is more specific: to examine how oral history helps illuminate the biocultural heritage of a mountain territory and how such testimony can contribute to broader debates on sustainability transitions and the role of the SSH. The emphasis therefore lies on interpretive depth and conceptual relevance rather than total coverage.

A further limitation lies in the composition of the interview corpus itself, particularly its exclusively male profile and its concentration in older generations. These characteristics do not weaken the analytical value of the material, but they do shape the kinds of experience, memory, and territorial knowledge that are most directly represented in the study.

The interviewees: composition, profiles, and generational distribution

The oral history corpus examined in this article comprises 19 interviews conducted in October 2025. Potential interviewees were identified with the assistance of local intermediaries, who selected individuals with relevant life trajectories and experiences related to forest landscape, shepherding and transhumance, wildfires, and rural life. All selected interviewees were men whose trajectories provide a dense and socially differentiated view of Serra da Estrela as a lived mountain territory. Although the group does not claim statistical representativeness, it is highly revealing in qualitative terms. The interviewees are overwhelmingly rooted in Manteigas and Sameiro or maintain strong familial and professional ties to these localities, and their life histories cover a broad range of occupations directly linked to the mountain: shepherding, small-scale farming, forestry, environmental surveillance, local government, sociology, geography, anthropology, security, and textile entrepreneurship. Taken together, these profiles offer access to the mountain not as a single social world but as an interwoven field of pastoral, environmental, institutional, and economic experience.

A first striking feature of the corpus is its exclusively male composition. This is not an incidental detail. It reflects the social and occupational structuring of the testimonies collected, which privilege professions and roles historically associated with men in Serra da Estrela, especially shepherding, forestry, environmental protection, and mountain labor. At the same time, this composition has analytical consequences: it means that the corpus gives privileged access to male experiences of work, mobility, pastoral continuity, and territorial stewardship, while women’s equally central roles in cheese production, household economies, care, and everyday forms of rural reproduction remain mediated through male narratives rather than directly voiced. The corpus is therefore highly valuable, but it also bears the marks of a gendered archive.

The age profile of the interviewees reinforces the broader picture of demographic aging and uneven generational continuity in the region. The oldest interviewee, José “Faísca,” was born in 1938 and began shepherding at the age of seven, while the youngest, Rui Miguel, was born in 1991. Between these two poles, the corpus includes a strong concentration of men born between the 1950s and 1970s, such as José Lucas Botelho b. 1951, João Clara de Assunção b.1954, Joaquim Biscaia b.1955, Gabriel Cardoso Pinheiro b. 1957, Aires Ferreira Martins b. 1962, António Gabriel b. 1963, Luís André Costa b. 1964, Paulo Costa b. 1967, Rafael Neiva b. 1968, João Manuel Duarte b. 1972, Sérgio Almeida b. 1977, and Júlio Sá Rego b. 1979. It also includes a smaller group of younger participants, notably José Massano b. One thousand, nine hundred and eighty four and Rogério Sabugueiro b. 1987. This distribution gives the corpus considerable value for tracing both long-term continuity and generational rupture.

From an analytical point of view, the interviewees can be grouped into several overlapping clusters. The first is composed of older shepherds and pastoral actors, including José Sabugueiro, José “Faísca,” José Lopes, António Gabriel, and José Lucas Botelho. Their trajectories are strongly marked by childhood labor, inherited knowledge, small-scale livestock rearing, milk production, cheese-making practices, and a vivid memory of hardship, continuity, and decline. These testimonies are crucial because they preserve forms of ecological and practical knowledge that are deeply embedded in the seasonal and material life of the mountain. They also register a recurrent perception that younger generations are increasingly detached from pastoral labor and that institutional support for these ways of life remains insufficient.

A second cluster includes younger or relatively younger actors who remain linked to pastoral activity, especially Rui Miguel and Rogério Sabugueiro, whose joint interview highlights both continuity and fragility. Their trajectories are marked by movement across different sectors—hotel work, firefighting, cooking, gardening—before returning to livestock raising and shepherding. Their testimonies are especially important because they complicate simple narratives of disappearance: they show that younger engagement with pastoral life still exists, but under conditions shaped by precariousness, institutional inadequacy, and the memory of environmental catastrophe, particularly the 2022 fire. José Massano occupies a related but distinct position: although currently serving in the GNR (National Republican Guard, a gendarmerie force), his testimony is deeply rooted in a childhood shaped by shepherding, family labor, and cheese production, allowing him to speak from both proximity and distance.

A third major group comprises those whose lives are structured around forest management, environmental surveillance, and territorial protection: Carlos Alberto Marques Domingos, Luís André Costa, Gabriel Cardoso Pinheiro, Sérgio Almeida, Aires Ferreira Martins, and João Manuel Duarte. Through them, the corpus gains a highly concrete perspective on wildfire risk, vegetation management, biodiversity loss, declining water resources, institutional change, and the reorganization of environmental professions. Their testimonies repeatedly connect climate change, the reduction of pastoral activity, the abandonment of grazing, and the changing governance of forests and protected areas. They also reveal how environmental change is perceived not only as an abstract process but as something experienced through work routines, institutional dismantling, and increasing pressure on the mountain landscape.

A fourth cluster includes mediators, interpreters, and institutionally embedded observers such as Paulo Costa, Joaquim Biscaia, Rafael Neiva, Júlio Sá Rego, and José Massano. These interviewees bring sociological, pedagogical, technical, anthropological, and civic perspectives that connect local knowledge with broader frameworks of governance, policy, education, and territorial development. This group is especially important because it makes visible the tensions between formal governance and lived territorial knowledge, a key issue for the article’s broader argument about the role of SSH in sustainability transitions.

A final, smaller but significant profile is represented by João Clara de Assunção, whose trajectory as manager of the family burel factory broadens the corpus beyond pastoralism and environmental management. His testimony introduces the question of economic resilience, industrial heritage, local entrepreneurship, and the reinvention of mountain resources for contemporary markets. This matters because it shows that the socio-ecological life of Serra da Estrela cannot be reduced to pastoral memory alone. It also includes industrial continuities, cultural production, and forms of economic adaptation tied to wool, labor, and regional identity. The wider territorial relevance of burel and the wool industry is also recognized in the Biosphere Reserve candidacy, which highlights their historical role in the economy and identity of the Estrela region.

Taken together, the interviewees form a corpus marked by three strong characteristics. First, it is a corpus of deep territorial embeddedness: even where migration, study, military service, or work outside the region appear in individual trajectories, Serra da Estrela remains the central referential landscape. Second, it is a corpus structured by aging, demographic contraction, and uneven generational succession, which gives particular weight to memory as a repository of knowledge under pressure. Third, it is a corpus that spans different forms of territorial relationship—pastoral, environmental, administrative, pedagogical, entrepreneurial, and familial—allowing the mountain to emerge as a complex socio-ecological system rather than a single occupational or symbolic field.

This composition is especially productive for the purposes of the article. It allows oral history to reveal not only individual recollections but also a broader social ecology of voices through which Serra da Estrela is remembered, interpreted, worked, protected, and contested. At the same time, the corpus has clear internal asymmetries—most notably its exclusively male composition and its strong concentration in older generations—which must be acknowledged as part of the conditions under which this mountain archive has been assembled. Far from diminishing its value, these features help clarify the historical and social location of the testimonies and sharpen the analytical reading of what they make visible, what they preserve, and what they leave in partial shadow.

Interview synopses: trajectories, perspectives, and specific contributions

Taken individually, the interviews reveal distinct trajectories and emphases; read together, they form a layered archive of mountain life in which memory, labor, environmental observation, and territorial change are closely intertwined. Some testimonies are anchored in pastoral experience, others in forest protection, local administration, education, or entrepreneurship. This diversity is analytically valuable because it allows Serra da Estrela to be approached through multiple, intersecting forms of territorial knowledge rather than through a single occupational lens.

Among the voices most directly rooted in shepherding, José Sabugueiro1 occupies a particularly important place. Born in Manteigas and raised by his grandparents, he represents a pastoral world shaped by early labor, seasonal mobility, sheep farming, and a strong emotional attachment to place. His interview links pastoral memory to wider perceptions of territorial decline, especially the weakening of the profession, the reduced interest of younger generations, and the deterioration of local health services, while also conveying a deeply affective attachment to Manteigas itself.

José “Faísca,” born in 1938,2 begun shepherding at the age of seven, and preserves a memory of the mountain shaped by long stays in the highlands, practical knowledge of flock management, and an intimate relation between labor, marriage, subsistence, and mobility. His testimony is especially rich in references to wolves, traditional clothing, bread-making, self-sufficiency, and the figure of his wife as both partner and fellow pastoral worker.

José Lopes3 provides a more austere and direct account of shepherding continuity and contraction. He speaks from the perspective of a man who has spent his whole life in Manteigas and whose experience is structured by daily work with sheep, seasonal movement, and subsistence-based rural life. His testimony highlights the reduction of flock size, the abandonment of cheese production, the lack of economic and institutional support, and the growing sense that shepherding may disappear altogether if no structural change occurs. He also offers important observations on snow, isolation, and the older rhythms of mountain life.

António Gabriel4 connects shepherding to family displacement, return migration, self-sufficiency, and environmental observation. Born in Manteigas in 1963, he spent part of his early life in Angola after his family lost access to grazing land as a result of state forestry policies. His interview links goat herding, artisanal cheese-making, and local gastronomy with observations on changing water regimes, flora, fauna, and the shrinking viability of traditional production under present sanitary and economic conditions.

José Lucas Botelho, born in Sameiro in 1951,5 offers a pastoral testimony marked by subsistence agriculture, military experience, artisanal cheese-making, and long memory of snow and hardship. His interview is significant for the way it connects everyday mountain work to larger historical events, including military service in Mozambique, while maintaining a strong focus on goats, milking, handcrafted cheese, wildfire, and the loss of institutional support. Particularly striking is his account of older winters, species disappearance and proliferation, and the 2022 wildfire as a moment of acute betrayal by firefighting structures.

Rui Miguel6 and Rogério Sabugueiro provide one of the most important interviews in the corpus, representing a rare case of younger generational continuity within a field otherwise dominated by aging voices. Born in 1991 and 1987, respectively, both returned to shepherding after working in other sectors. Their testimony combines continuity with rupture: they remain committed to goat herding, but their experience is shaped by low milk prices, bureaucracy, infrastructural limits, and vulnerability to both fire and post-fire flooding. Their account of the 2022 wildfire and the subsequent flood in Sameiro is one of the strongest testimonies of compounded environmental disaster in the corpus.

José Massano,7 born in 1984, narrates a dual point of view: a childhood deeply marked by his grandparents’ and parents’ involvement in shepherding, milking, and cheese production, but an adult life in the GNR and later in environmental protection work. This dual position allows him to reflect both from within and beyond the pastoral world, especially on its decline, on the transformation of the landscape, and on the importance of environmental pedagogy, prevention, and cultural identity.

The interviews of Aires Ferreira Martins and João Manuel Duarte8 provide the perspective of “ sapadores florestais” (professional firefighters). Their testimony centers on work routines and conditions, limited resources and under-recognition, while also reflecting on climate change, declining snow cover, the spread of dense shrub vegetation, the scarcity of younger residents, the structure of local fire surveillance, and the devastation caused by recent fires.

Carlos Alberto Marques Domingos, a “Vigilante da Natureza” (nature protection ranger) born in Manteigas in 1964,9 provides one of the clearest institutional-territorial readings in the corpus. He emphasizes the tension between conservation rules and local populations, criticizes the concentration of tourism infrastructure at the Torre, and repeatedly returns to questions of territorial planning and environmental awareness.

Gabriel Cardoso Pinheiro, a former “ Guarda Florestal” (Forest Ranger) born in 1957,10 brings an especially forceful memory of the old forest services and of what he sees as their dismantling. His interview is marked by strong criticism of contemporary fire management, praise for earlier forms of direct intervention in the mountain, and repeated insistence that the abandonment of grazing, wood gathering, and local stewardship has contributed decisively to current fire regimes.

Luís André Costa, born in 196411 and also shaped by a family connection to the forest services, offers a parallel but distinct testimony. He highlights the professional trajectory of the “ Guarda Florestal” (Forest Rangers), the tensions created by its absorption into the GNR, and the contrast between older and contemporary fire-combat practices. His account is especially strong on tactical knowledge, the value of “ contrafogo” (controlled burn), the need for continuous post-fire surveillance, and the ecological consequences of wolf disappearance and wild boar proliferation.

Sérgio Almeida, born in 197712 into a family strongly associated with forest vigilance, combines inherited local knowledge with current practical responsibilities. His interview testimony reflects on shrinking snow cover, increased shrub growth, the financing problems of “sapador” teams, the limits of current fire-response systems, and the strategic value of controlled burning and temporary summer grazing arrangements with flocks from neighboring municipalities.

Joaquim Biscaia, born in Sameiro in 1955,13 brings an important pedagogical and civic perspective. His life trajectory—marked by emigration to France, academic training in education, and a career as a geography teacher—allows him to connect mountain memory with schooling, field-based pedagogy, and environmental awareness. His interview emphasizes the role of the landscape in shaping his educational practice, the visible effects of climate change on species distribution, the political tension between local infrastructure demands and nature protection during his years as a parish president, and the enduring quality-of-life appeal of Serra da Estrela.

Paulo Costa, born in 196714 in Manteigas, offers one of the most synthetic and historically interpretive interviews in the corpus. Trained in sociology and active in local government, he reflects on the social history of housing, labor, family life, the decline of pastoralism, the rise and fall of the textile economy, the environmental consequences of state forestry, and the growing role of tourism. His testimony is particularly rich in historical layering: he sees Manteigas through the combined lenses of pastoralism, industry, and forestation, while also connecting local change to education, public services, climate change, local myths, and community resilience.

Júlio Sá Rego introduces an external but deeply engaged anthropological perspective. Born in Paris in 1979,15 he later worked in UNESCO and then carried out doctoral research in Portugal focused on pastoralism, fire, and rural policy. His testimony reflects directly on the gap between public policy and local knowledge, on the mistrust between rural communities and institutions, and on the ethnographic and political significance of transhumance in Serra da Estrela. He also documents the work that led to the inventorying and recognition of transhumance as intangible cultural heritage.

Rafael Ferrão Neiva, born in France in 196816 and trained as a forest engineer, offers one of the most articulate mediating voices in the set. Having built his career in Serra da Estrela, he repeatedly insists that shepherds are not peripheral but central to landscape maintenance, biodiversity, and fire prevention. His interview combining technical knowledge with a strong practical ethic of dialogue, small-scale intervention, and institutional mediation, particularly in relation to range grazing, conservation, fire, and the future viability of the mountain.

Finally, João Clara de Assunção, born in 1954,17 gives the corpus an indispensable economic and industrial dimension. His testimony centers on the burel factory founded by his family, its modernization, his own return from Lisbon, and the international reinvention of burel as a material of design, fashion, and architecture. At the same time, he reflects critically on the fragility of the local economy, the dependence on tourism, the importance of employment, and the threats facing the wool-processing chain. His interview expands the article’s social ecology of the mountain by showing Serra da Estrela as a territory that encompasses pasture, forest, and protected landscape, but also as a site of industrial heritage and entrepreneurial resilience.

Taken together, these interview synopses show that the corpus is neither homogeneous nor dispersed. It is heterogeneous in trajectory, profession, and tone, but highly coherent in the kinds of territorial knowledge it preserves. Each interview adds a specific angle—pastoral, environmental, pedagogical, institutional, entrepreneurial, or mediating—while repeatedly returning to shared concerns: the changing mountain climate, the decline of older practices, the fragility of intergenerational transmission, the mismatch between institutions and lived reality, and the search for viable futures in a territory under environmental and demographic pressure. In that sense, the set of interviews functions as more than a source base. It constitutes a polyphonic archive through which the Serra da Estrela becomes legible as a socio-ecological and biocultural territory in transition.

Major themes emerging from the interviews

Across the corpus, several themes recur with notable consistency, despite the diversity of trajectories and social positions represented. These themes do not appear as isolated topics; they are interwoven in the interviewees’ accounts and often reinforce one another. Taken together, they reveal a mountain territory marked by environmental change, demographic contraction, institutional tension, and strong but fragile forms of socio-ecological knowledge.

A first and highly recurrent theme is the decline of pastoralism and the increasing fragility of the primary sector. This appears most directly in the testimonies of António Gabriel, José Lopes, José Lucas Botelho, José Sabugueiro, José “Faísca,” Rui Miguel, Rogério Sabugueiro, and José Massano, but it is also echoed by Paulo Costa, Gabriel Cardoso Pinheiro, Rafael Neiva, and Júlio Sá Rego. The interviews consistently describe pastoralism as a profession of intense physical demand, permanent commitment, and diminishing attractiveness for younger generations. They also point to the growing weight of sanitary regulation, bureaucratic requirements, and weak economic returns. Several interviewees describe the transition from artisanal cheese-making to the sale of milk at low prices as a major rupture, while others insist that the erosion of pastoralism has consequences far beyond the economic sphere, affecting the maintenance of open landscapes, the continuity of local knowledge, and the cultural identity of the mountain.

A second major theme concerns climate change and the visible transformation of the mountain landscape. This is one of the most widely shared perceptions in the corpus. Aires Ferreira Martins and João Manuel Duarte describe a mountain with less snow, hotter summers, and denser shrub cover, making both labor and fire prevention more difficult. Carlos Alberto Marques Domingos recalls the decline of river flow and the drying of places once known for abundant water. Sérgio Almeida and Luís Costa also emphasize the reduction in snow persistence and the acceleration of vegetation growth under warmer conditions. Joaquim Biscaia highlights the spread of warmer-climate species such as holm oak to higher elevations, while José Lopes, José Lucas Botelho, António Gabriel, and José Massano repeatedly contrast present-day conditions with the heavier snow, lower temperatures, and greater hydrological regularity of the past. In all these cases, climate change is narrated through direct observation of altered seasonality, water availability, vegetation, and work conditions.

Closely linked to this is the theme of wildfire as catastrophe, trauma, and governance failure, particularly in relation to the major fire of 2022. This is one of the strongest points of convergence in the interviews. Gabriel Cardoso Pinheiro, Luís Costa, Sérgio Almeida, Carlos Alberto Marques Domingos, Rafael Neiva, Aires Martins, João Duarte, José Lucas Botelho, Rui Miguel, Rogério Sabugueiro, and José Massano all speak of the fires either as direct participants in response efforts or as inhabitants whose lives, property, and environment were threatened. Several of these testimonies criticize current fire-management practices, especially the distance between command structures and local knowledge, the tendency to rely on road-based firefighting rather than ground intervention in the vegetation, and the insufficient use of preventive land management. The 2022 fire appears repeatedly as more than an environmental event. It functions as a collective revelation of deeper structural weaknesses in territorial planning, institutional coordination, and the recognition of practical knowledge held by those who know the mountain intimately.

A fourth major theme is the perception of institutional abandonment, inadequate public support, and burdensome bureaucracy. This is expressed in different vocabularies depending on the interviewees’ position, but it forms a remarkably coherent pattern. Rui Miguel and Rogério Sabugueiro insist on the lack of support for feed, fencing, and viable small-scale production. José Lopes expresses deep frustration at the absence of effective local or governmental support for shepherds. Aires Martins, João Manuel Duarte, and Sérgio Almeida stress the underpayment and weak recognition of “sapador” work, as well as the limited public financing of their teams. Gabriel Cardoso Pinheiro and Luís Costa criticize the dismantling or weakening of earlier forest-management structures, while Rafael Neiva and Júlio Sá Rego underline the failure of public policy to listen seriously to those who manage the landscape in practice. Even João Clara de Assunção, from a very different economic position, voices concern over institutional inaction in relation to the regional wool-processing chain. Across these accounts, bureaucracy appears not as a neutral administrative matter, but as a force that often disconnects policy from lived territorial realities.

Another recurring theme is depopulation, youth outmigration, and the erosion of basic services. Paulo Costa offers one of the most systematic views of this issue, linking demographic decline to the closure of services, shrinking opportunities, and weakened local vitality. José Sabugueiro, Carlos Alberto Marques Domingos, Aires Martins, João Manuel Duarte, and João Clara de Assunção all refer in different ways to the aging of the population and the difficulty of retaining younger people in Manteigas and its surroundings. Rui Miguel and Rogério Sabugueiro speak from within this problem, as rare younger pastoral actors who remain in the territory but perceive themselves as exceptions. These concerns are often connected to the decline of health care, the disappearance of maternity and hospital services, the centralization of care in Guarda, and the broader sense that interior territories have been progressively deprived of the conditions needed for continuity. Here again, the interviews show that depopulation is experienced as a lived weakening of everyday viability.

The corpus also repeatedly addresses the transformation of fauna and the rebalancing of ecological relations, especially through the disappearance of wolves and the proliferation of wild boar. This theme is present in the testimonies of José Lucas Botelho, Sérgio Almeida, Luís Costa, Rafael Neiva, Rui Miguel, Rogério Sabugueiro, Joaquim Biscaia, José “Faísca,” António Gabriel, and others. Older interviewees recall wolves as a real danger to flocks and daily pastoral work, while several testimonies now describe wild boar as a major problem for agriculture and subsistence cultivation. These accounts do more than document species change. They narrate shifts in ecological balance as directly experienced through pastoral losses, crop destruction, changing vegetation, and altered relations between wild and domestic life. In this sense, the interviews connect biodiversity and fauna change to lived forms of socio-ecological disruption.

Another highly relevant theme concerns the reconfiguration of the local economy, especially the transition from wool and textiles toward tourism and selective forms of entrepreneurial reinvention. João Clara de Assunção’s testimony is central here, showing how burel and wool-based production can be repositioned through quality, export, design, and heritage value. Paulo Costa places this within the longer trajectory of Manteigas, where pastoralism, textiles, and afforestation successively shaped the local economy. Joaquim Biscaia, Carlos Alberto Marques Domingos, and Rafael Neiva all acknowledge the importance of tourism, though with varying degrees of caution. What emerges is not a simple success narrative. Tourism appears as a vital but insufficient horizon, one that can support economic life but cannot by itself resolve the structural fragilities of the mountain. The interviews therefore show both adaptation and vulnerability in the economic transition of the territory. The material also suggests that tourism, while important, cannot substitute the material and social conditions required to sustain pastoral livelihoods, intergenerational continuity, and territorial stewardship.

Running across all these themes is a final and especially important one: the persistence of deep territorial attachment, local pride, and a powerful ethic of care for the mountain. This is one of the strongest unifying features of the corpus. Whether speaking from pastoral, environmental, institutional, pedagogical, or entrepreneurial positions, the interviewees consistently express a profound sense of belonging to Serra da Estrela. José Sabugueiro declares that being separated from Manteigas would be like losing life itself. José Massano summarizes his relation to the mountain in one word: “passion.” Sérgio Almeida uses the same word. Joaquim Biscaia presents the mountain as a source of health, pedagogy, and emotional connection. Rafael Neiva, though not born in the region, speaks from a long-standing practical and affective commitment to its people and landscape. This shared attachment is analytically important because it prevents the interviews from being read only as records of decline. They are also testimonies of commitment, stewardship, and insistence on the possibility of continuity under difficult conditions.

Taken together, these themes reveal a coherent underlying structure. Serra da Estrela emerges as a territory in which environmental change, labor, governance, memory, and identity are inseparable. The decline of pastoralism cannot be understood apart from bureaucracy, depopulation, and climate change; wildfire cannot be understood apart from vegetation dynamics, abandonment, and institutional distance from local knowledge; economic transition cannot be understood apart from the erosion of older livelihoods and the search for new forms of viability. Oral history is particularly powerful here because it allows these dimensions to appear in relation rather than isolation. The interviews not only identify problems; they also reveal how communities interpret them, connect them, and live through them, thereby offering a particularly rich basis for understanding the mountain as a socio-ecological and biocultural territory in transition.

Transhumance between history, memory, and contemporary territorial relevance

Among the themes emerging from the interviews, transhumance occupies a particularly important place because it condenses, within a single practice, many of the core dimensions explored in this article: mobility, adaptation, ecological knowledge, intergenerational transmission, cultural memory, and the relationship between local livelihoods and the broader socio-ecological organization of the mountain. The literature consistently describes transhumance in Serra da Estrela as a long-standing pastoral system based on the seasonal movement of flocks between high-altitude summer pastures and lower wintering grounds, especially in the Beira Baixa, Idanha, the Alto Douro, and, in some cases, the Alentejo. It was a rational response to climatic constraints, pasture availability, and the wider economy of wool and livestock production, and it contributed to the shaping of routes, seasonal settlements, collective organization, and a distinctive cultural landscape.

The historical literature also makes clear that transhumance was never a single or static phenomenon. It encompassed different durations, destinations, and modalities. Recent studies distinguish between long-duration winter transhumance from the upper Serra to lower and warmer territories, and shorter or medium-duration movements to nearby zones; they also distinguish descending winter transhumance from ascending summer movement toward the mountain pastures. In Serra da Estrela, the route linking the upper mountain to the plains of Idanha-a-Nova stands out as one of the most significant in Portugal, while other routes connected the mountain to the Alto Douro and to the lower Mondego. The economic centrality of wool and the complementarity between upland and lowland ecologies were crucial to this system, which remained alive in parts of the region until the mid- to late twentieth century.

What the interviews add to this historical framework is a more granular understanding of how transhumance was remembered, embodied, and socially organized. Several interviewees speak directly to the practice, though from different positions. José Sabugueiro provides the strongest first-person testimony of long-distance winter transhumance. He recalls making the journey to Idanha-a-Nova for the first time at the age of nine, accompanying his father, and later going repeatedly to wintering grounds such as the “Mata das Porcas”, near Castelo Branco. His account emphasizes not only the route but the physical hardship: walking for days, sleeping on the ground or outdoors, and relying on the traditional woolen cloak for shelter. He also recalls how shepherds gathered in groups and rotated responsibilities while staying in the high mountain during the summer. His testimony strongly corroborates the literature on the duration, severity, and collective organization of these movements, while adding the experiential density that only oral history can provide.

The historical material from Manteigas collected in earlier ethnographic research helps clarify the significance of this testimony (Morgado, 2013). That research notes that the departure of transhumant flocks from Serra usually took place between late September and early November, with return in March or April, and that, by the twentieth century, long-course transhumance was already in decline. It also records the collective structure of the campaigns: several flocks would be joined under the responsibility of maiorais (head or senior shepherds), with donkeys, dogs, and multiple shepherds responsible for logistics and day-to-day management. The route to Idanha could take around 5 days, with stopping points such as Vale Formoso, Capinha, Pedrógão, and the surroundings of Idanha-a-Nova before some flocks continued farther south (Morgado, 2013; Carvalho and Marques, 2020; Rei, 2013; Vicente, 2014). The fact that José Sabugueiro’s account converges so closely with this earlier documentation is analytically important, because it shows how oral memory sustains a historically verifiable map of movement while also retaining its emotional and bodily dimensions.

Other interviewees complement and expand this picture. Joaquim Biscaia does not speak as a transhumant shepherd but as a child witness from Sameiro. He remembers standing by the roadside and seeing and hearing the passage of large flocks on their way toward Idanha, thus preserving the sensory and collective visibility that transhumance once had in local life. This matters because it shows that transhumance was not only an occupational practice of shepherds; it was also a public and communal phenomenon inscribed in village memory. Paulo Costa, in turn, situates its decline historically, associating the waning of transhumance in the 1960s and 1970s with the broader contraction of pastoralism in Manteigas, where the number of flocks and active shepherds once reached levels that now seem almost unimaginable. His account helps place transhumance within the wider socio-economic transformations of the municipality rather than treating it as an isolated pastoral custom.

The interviews also show that memory of transhumance is not confined to sheep-based winter migration. António Gabriel introduces an important distinction by noting that those with sheep were compelled to leave for winter transhumance, while those with goats, such as his grandfather, could remain in Manteigas by relying on stored hay. This detail is methodologically valuable because it complicates any homogenizing view of the practice. It suggests that species composition, fodder availability, and household organization shaped the degree and necessity of seasonal mobility. In that sense, oral testimony refines the historical model by showing that transhumance was structured by climate, geography, species composition, fodder availability, and the organization of each pastoral economy.

The younger and more institutionally mediated voices add a further layer by emphasizing the continued relevance of summer transhumance. José Massano recalls how, during his youth, the mountain came alive in July, August, and September with flocks brought upward, allowing lower fields to be freed for haymaking and other agricultural tasks. His account is especially clear on the logic of complementarity between high and low land: the mountain was not an isolated pasture reserve, but part of a wider seasonal system linking grazing, crop cycles, fodder storage, and household subsistence. Similarly, José Lopes confirms a simpler but equally telling pattern: winter in lower areas, summer in the high mountain. These testimonies show that, even when long-distance winter transhumance had already largely disappeared, forms of vertical seasonal mobility remained central to the organization of mountain life.

This is where the interviews resonate particularly well with both historical and ethnographic literature. Studies of Serra da Estrela stress that upward summer movement was not secondary to winter descent (Morgado, 2013; Vicente, 2014; Carvalho and Marques, 2020). It was fundamental to the internal agrarian organization of the region because it released lower agricultural land for cultivation and hay storage while taking advantage of the summer grasslands of the high mountain. The timing between São João and São Miguel, mentioned in the literature and echoed in the interviews, reflects the seasonal regularity of this movement. Oral testimony therefore helps recover the lived operational logic of transhumance. It was a highly coordinated way of managing complementary ecological zones.

A particularly important contribution comes from Júlio Sá Rego, whose testimony bridges scholarship, ethnography, and heritage policy. As the coordinator of the inventory that culminated in the recognition of transhumance as Intangible Cultural Heritage of Portugal, he distinguishes very clearly between historical winter transhumance and still-active summer ascent. He also stresses the practical role of mixed flocks, noting that goats helped pull sheep toward better grazing areas because of their more restless and exploratory behavior. Equally important is his attention to the ritual and symbolic dimensions of the practice, especially the sheep pilgrimages, in which flocks were blessed by local parishes before entering the dangers of the mountain. Through Júlio Sá Rego’s account, transhumance appears simultaneously as an economic and ecological system, a carrier of ritual, a vehicle of knowledge circulation, and a form of heritage.

This ritual and cultural dimension is strongly supported by the literature. Historical and ethnographic sources show that transhumance circulated much more than animals (Morgado, 2013; Vicente, 2014; Carvalho and Marques, 2020; Moreno-Medina et al., 2026; Rei, 2013). It circulated practices, stories, forms of sociability, technologies of cheese production, and practical adaptations to differing ecological conditions. Some authors even point to the dissemination of pastoral and dairy knowledge through transhumant routes, including adaptations in other regions where climatic conditions differed from those of Serra da Estrela. In this respect, the interviews and the literature converge in showing that transhumance functioned as a vector of cultural transmission, not merely as a pastoral movement. Oral testimony also suggests that transhumance should be read through a wider intangible field: local vocabularies, place-names, route markers, material practices, and sensory memories associated with pastoral movement and seasonal occupation.

The contemporary ecological relevance of transhumance emerges with particular force in the testimonies of Rafael Neiva and Sérgio Almeida. Rafael Neiva interprets transhumance through the lens of range grazing, emphasizing its value for seed dispersal, biodiversity maintenance, and landscape management. He argues that shepherds and moving flocks should be seen as active managers of ecological processes rather than as remnants of an outdated rural world. Sérgio Almeida offers a particularly concrete example of this contemporary refunctionalization: the Baldio of São Pedro provides pasture and lodging to shepherds from Seia during the summer so that their flocks can graze mountain vegetation and reduce fuel loads. In his account, these “outside” flocks may reach around one thousand head, becoming an essential ally in wildfire prevention. Together, these testimonies show how a historically subsistence-based practice has acquired renewed strategic significance in the context of climate change and fire-prone landscapes.

This present-day ecological reading is also supported by recent scholarship on mountain pastoralism and transhumance. Current studies highlight that mobile grazing systems create landscape mosaics, reduce shrub continuity, contribute to seed circulation, and support a more heterogeneous and resilient ecological structure. In abandoned mountain territories, where shrub encroachment and fuel accumulation have become major concerns, transhumant or semi-transhumant grazing is increasingly recognized as a practical and low-impact form of land management. The interviews also show how older pastoral rationalities can be reinterpreted within contemporary debates on resilience, fire prevention, and regenerative territorial management.

At the same time, the interviews make clear that transhumance is no longer a widely lived routine in Manteigas itself. José Lucas Botelho notes with sadness that no one from Manteigas now undertakes transhumance in the older sense, and that the flocks he sees moving are mostly from Gouveia or Seia on their way toward the Fundão area. This observation is significant because it captures the dual status of transhumance in the present: still visible, still operative in part, but also territorially displaced and socially thinned. Oral memory thus records not only continuity, but also the uneven geography of persistence.

For the purposes of this article, transhumance matters precisely because it allows these different temporalities to be read together. It is at once a historical pastoral system, a remembered life-world, a heritage category, and a practice with renewed ecological relevance. The literature provides the structural history of routes, seasons, and economic logic; the interviews reveal how those structures were lived, organized, perceived, and remembered. They also show that transhumance still operates as a powerful narrative of territorial intelligence: a way of naming the knowledge through which communities once synchronized climate, terrain, labor, and livestock, and through which some of that intelligence may still inform contemporary approaches to mountain sustainability.

In this sense, transhumance becomes one of the clearest examples of what this article understands as biocultural heritage. It links ecology and culture, movement and memory, subsistence and symbolism, practical knowledge and collective identity. It also helps clarify the broader argument of the article: oral history is indispensable because it allows historically grounded forms of adaptation and stewardship to re-enter contemporary debates on sustainability, resilience, and the transformation of mind-sets in mountain territories.

Oral history and the epistemic expansion of sustainability research

The findings presented above show that oral history offers far more than a supplementary record of local experience. In Serra da Estrela, it functions as a mode of access to socio-ecological knowledge that is historically grounded, territorially embedded, and analytically indispensable for understanding how mountain communities interpret environmental change, negotiate continuity and loss, and sustain relationships with landscape across generations. This reinforces a broader argument developed in recent work on memory, biocultural heritage, and Biosphere Reserves: oral testimonies illuminate forms of knowledge, stewardship, and environmental perception that often remain weakly represented in technical datasets and formal governance frameworks, even though they are central to how territories have been shaped and cared for over time. In this respect, the findings contribute to broader debates on sustainable development in mountain regions by showing how memory, community knowledge, and biocultural heritage shape more territorially grounded pathways of transition.

The Serra da Estrela case is especially revealing because it shows that sustainability in mountain territories cannot be adequately understood through environmental indicators, planning instruments, or conservation categories alone. The interviews consistently describe a mountain where ecological processes, labor, mobility, memory, and identity remain deeply entangled. Climate change is experienced as a transformation in snow patterns, water availability, shrub density, seasonal rhythms, and everyday work conditions. Wildfire is remembered as disaster, while also being interpreted as the outcome of changing vegetation, declining grazing, institutional misalignment, and the erosion of practical stewardship. Pastoralism appears as a biocultural system whose contraction affects landscape maintenance, intergenerational transmission, and the social meaning of the mountain itself. In this sense, the interviews confirm that mountain territories are socio-ecological formations in which environmental change becomes legible through lived experience and historical memory.

One of the central contributions of the article, therefore, is to show that oral history widens the epistemic basis of sustainability research. The testimonies do not simply add illustrative detail to a pre-existing technical diagnosis; they reveal dimensions of socio-ecological reality that would otherwise remain partial or flattened. They make visible what may be described as the lived infrastructure of sustainability: accumulated practical knowledge, embodied observation, moral vocabularies of care, and forms of territorial intelligence carried in daily practice rather than codified in planning documents. In this respect, the results support the broader view that memory is part of biocultural heritage and that biocultural heritage itself is not a decorative or retrospective category, but a living resource for stewardship, interpretation, and governance.

Biocultural heritage and the mountain as a socio-ecological territory

The results make clear that Serra da Estrela is best understood not as a scenic or protected backdrop, but as a socio-ecological territory shaped by long interaction between ecological conditions and human practice. The interviews consistently show that knowledge of altitude, water, pasture, snow, seasonal rhythms, animal behavior, and routes is inseparable from lived histories of work, subsistence, adaptation, and belonging. This strongly supports the usefulness of biocultural heritage as an interpretive framework. The concept helps explain why landscape cannot be reduced to its physical or ecological attributes alone: it is also the product of historically sedimented relations among ecosystems, cultural practices, local economies, moral values, and collective memory.

This point is particularly important in a territory whose institutional framing increasingly emphasizes conservation, heritage, and sustainable development. Serra da Estrela’s status as a UNESCO Global Geopark and candidate Biosphere Reserve depends, at least in part, on the recognition that natural and cultural dimensions of the territory are inseparable. The interviews reinforce this understanding from below. They show that community memory is not external to environmental governance. It is part of the cultural infrastructure through which ecological change is interpreted, territory is valued, and responsibilities are negotiated. Oral testimony thus contributes not only to documentation but also to the conceptual deepening of what sustainability means in such territories.

The findings also complicate any simplified opposition between tradition and modernity. The testimonies do not merely lament the disappearance of older ways of life. They reveal multiple forms of continuity, adaptation, and re-signification. This is especially clear in the coexistence of pastoral memory, forest-management knowledge, environmental pedagogy, local government experience, and entrepreneurial reinvention. Serra da Estrela emerges as a territory where older practices and new pressures overlap, where loss is real but not total, and where the future cannot be meaningfully imagined without engaging the cultural and ecological continuities preserved in memory. In that sense, biocultural heritage encompasses both the safeguarding of the past and the identification of relational knowledge through which more viable futures may still be constructed.

Transhumance as adaptive memory and regenerative practice

The analysis of transhumance is especially productive because it condenses many of the article’s main concerns in a single theme. In the literature, transhumance appears as a highly rational pastoral system linking upland and lowland ecologies through seasonal mobility, labor coordination, and ecological complementarity. In the interviews, it appears as memory of bodily endurance, route knowledge, collective organization, climatic adaptation, and the seasonal rebalancing of land use. The dialogue between these two registers is one of the article’s strongest contributions. It shows how oral history can bring structural history into contact with lived experience, thereby clarifying both.

Transhumance is particularly important because it illuminates a form of territorial rationality that differs sharply from linear or extractive models of resource use. It was based on cyclical movement, negotiated access, seasonal timing, ecological observation, and the complementary use of differentiated environments. In this sense, although it belongs to a pastoral world shaped by historical necessity, it also offers insight into broader questions of regeneration, restraint, adaptation, and relational coexistence. The interviews show that this knowledge was not abstract. It was embodied in movement, in the reading of terrain and weather, in flock composition, in the timing of ascent and descent, and in practical decisions linking mountain and lowland life.

At the same time, the interviews and literature show that transhumance is not simply a vanished historical practice. In a transformed form, it remains ecologically relevant. The testimonies of Rafael Neiva and Sérgio Almeida are particularly clear on this point: mobile grazing, and especially summer movement of flocks, contributes to fuel reduction, biodiversity maintenance, and the creation of landscape mosaics. In present conditions of shrub encroachment, fire risk, and demographic thinning, this older pastoral logic acquires renewed significance. Transhumance thus becomes more than a heritage object. It becomes a living example of how historically grounded practices may inform contemporary debates on climate resilience, regenerative territorial management, and the adaptive capacity of mountain landscapes.

For this reason, transhumance also emerges as one of the clearest empirical expressions of biocultural heritage in Serra da Estrela. It links ecology and culture, movement and memory, subsistence and symbolism, practical knowledge and collective identity. It also helps clarify a central claim of this article: oral history matters not only because it preserves disappearing testimonies, but because it allows historically grounded forms of adaptation and stewardship to re-enter present debates on sustainability, resilience, and the transformation of mind-sets in mountain territories.

Governance and the transformation of mind-sets

Serra da Estrela interviews repeatedly show that transitions depend on assumptions about who is recognized as knowledgeable, how evidence is interpreted, how institutions value lived expertise, and how communities imagine viable futures under conditions of ecological instability. This is precisely the terrain on which SSH make a distinctive contribution: not by displacing science and technology, but by interrogating the assumptions, hierarchies, narratives, and normative frames within which environmental action is organized.

This point is especially relevant to current debates on transforming mind-sets for sustainable and circular societies. Serra da Estrela interviews show that changing mind-sets is not a matter of rhetorical awareness alone. It involves reconfiguring how territory is perceived, how ecological limits are understood, how labor and care are valued, and how continuity between people and landscape is imagined. What emerges from the oral corpus is a strong challenge to linear and extractive understandings of the mountain. Interviewees repeatedly describe forms of use based on seasonality, negotiated access, ecological observation, restraint, and mutual adjustment between people, animals, water, vegetation, and altitude. These practices do not map neatly onto contemporary circular economy language, yet they reveal forms of territorial rationality that are cyclical, adaptive, and regenerative in a broader sense. Oral history makes those rationalities visible and intelligible, helping recover cultural narratives and lived repertoires that may inform more grounded and socially meaningful approaches to sustainability. This also calls for a critical approach to heritage valorization. When poorly framed, tourism can place additional pressure on fragile routes, landscapes, and practices; when grounded in living territorial realities, it can support recognition, education, and complementary forms of local continuity.

The governance implications are equally important. The interviews repeatedly point to a gap between formal institutions and lived territorial knowledge. They reveal a deficit of recognition and the absence of sufficiently integrated governance frameworks capable of linking conservation, rural livelihoods, heritage value, and territorial management within a shared mountain strategy. Shepherds, “sapadores,” forest workers, local officials, and mediating actors do not reject governance as such; rather, they describe governance arrangements that fail to hear, translate, or adequately integrate knowledge produced in everyday engagement with the mountain. The results therefore reinforce a broader point already present in oral history and memory initiatives: collecting, curating, and sharing testimony can do more than document the past. It can create forums of recognition, dialogue, and participation that strengthen the cultural and social foundations of environmental stewardship. In territories aspiring to or operating under UNESCO frameworks, this matters greatly, because the legitimacy and effectiveness of conservation and sustainable development depend in part on whether communities are treated as knowledge holders and co-producers of territorial futures.

Oral history thus contributes to action not through immediate prescription but through reframing. It changes what becomes visible, whose knowledge enters the conversation, and what kinds of future can be imagined as both desirable and territorially plausible. This is especially relevant for sustainability agendas seeking to move from formal interdisciplinarity toward genuinely transformative dialogue across sectors and knowledge systems. In that sense, the article contributes to the call not only by offering a case study, but by showing how a method from SSH can support more inclusive, culturally grounded, and actionable understandings of transition.

The implications of these findings speak directly to contemporary debates on sustainability governance and the role of communities in shaping the future of protected and UNESCO-recognized territories. Serra da Estrela offers a particularly relevant context in this regard. As a UNESCO Global Geopark and a candidate Biosphere Reserve, it forms part of a growing international movement in which territories are increasingly understood as living laboratories where conservation, sustainable development, research, education, and community participation are brought into continuous dialogue. Within this perspective, Biosphere Reserves in particular have come to be understood not simply as conservation instruments, but as governance models and learning platforms through which societies experiment with more integrated and adaptive approaches to sustainability (Rollo, 2025a).

Within this perspective, governance acquires the character of a process of collective learning. The long-term involvement of Geopark managers, local institutions, and community actors in the oral history work undertaken in Serra da Estrela reflects this orientation. The purpose has been to deepen mutual knowledge, strengthen dialogue between different forms of expertise, and create opportunities for shared reflection on the challenges facing the territory. Oral history contributes to this process by making visible experiences, perceptions, memories, values, and forms of knowledge that are rarely captured through conventional planning or monitoring tools, yet remain fundamental to how communities understand and inhabit the mountain.

The significance of this contribution reaches beyond Serra da Estrela. Across Biosphere Reserves, Geoparks, protected landscapes, and other sustainability-oriented territories, growing attention is being given to participatory governance, social learning, and community engagement as essential dimensions of territorial resilience (Rollo, 2025a,b). The findings presented here suggest that memory constitutes a strategic dimension of these processes, providing access to long-term environmental observation, accumulated territorial knowledge, and forms of social learning that are often difficult to capture through conventional governance instruments. Community memories reveal culturally embedded understandings of human–environment relationships, reinforce forms of belonging and responsibility associated with stewardship practices, and create opportunities for dialogue across generations, sectors, and knowledge systems.

From this perspective, oral history becomes part of the knowledge infrastructures through which territories learn about themselves, negotiate their futures, and strengthen their capacity to respond to environmental and social change. The broader contribution of this study therefore lies in demonstrating how memory, community knowledge, and biocultural heritage can enrich contemporary understandings of sustainability governance, supporting approaches that are historically informed, culturally grounded, and attentive to the lived realities of the communities who inhabit these territories.

Limitations and future directions

These conclusions should be read in light of the study’s limitations. The corpus is rich and analytically powerful, but it does not provide a complete social portrait of Serra da Estrela. Its exclusively male composition is a major asymmetry. The interviews give privileged access to male experiences of shepherding, forestry, surveillance, and territorial labor, while women’s crucial roles in cheese-making, household economies, care work, informal environmental knowledge, and the reproduction of rural life remain indirect or mediated through male voices. These practices are fundamental to the long-term resilience of mountain territories, yet they are frequently undervalued because they occur within domestic spheres rather than within publicly visible and institutionally recognized activities. As José “Faísca” emphasized, his ability to undertake long journeys during the transhumance season depended on the often-unacknowledged labor of his wife, who ensured the preparation and provision of food and the care of the cattle during these periods of mobility. Such accounts reveal that practices sustaining pastoral systems extended well beyond the visible activities of shepherding itself, relying also on forms of care and logistical support typically absent from dominant narratives of mountain life. This limitation is substantive, not merely formal, and it points clearly to the need for future research that would bring women’s perspectives directly into the analysis.

A further limitation concerns the nature of memory itself. Oral history does not provide direct or exhaustive access to the totality of past experience, just as documentary, archival, or statistical sources never offer complete representations of social reality. Memories are necessarily selective, situated, and shaped by personal trajectories, subsequent experiences, and the interpretive frameworks through which individuals make sense of their lives. The oral corpus examined here therefore cannot be understood as a comprehensive account of Serra da Estrela or of all the communities that inhabit the mountain. Rather, it offers a particular set of perspectives through which territorial experience, environmental change, and cultural continuity become visible.

This limitation should also be understood as part of the distinctive contribution of oral history. The value of testimony lies less in representational completeness than in its capacity to illuminate lived experience, situated knowledge, forms of perception, and dimensions of social and environmental life that frequently remain absent or weakly represented in other kinds of sources. Oral narratives make it possible to approach the territory from the perspective of those who inhabit, work, remember, and care for it, thereby complementing rather than replacing documentary, statistical, or policy-oriented forms of evidence.

Within the Memory for All framework, this limitation is further addressed through an open, cumulative, and participatory approach to knowledge production. All interviews are preserved and made publicly accessible, creating opportunities for continued engagement, reinterpretation, and expansion of the archive. The corpus should therefore be understood not as a closed or definitive collection, but as part of an evolving process through which communities, researchers, institutions, and territorial actors contribute to a progressively richer understanding of the mountain. In this sense, the archive remains permanently open to new voices, new perspectives, and new forms of participation.

The study also does not aim at statistical representativeness, nor does it seek to reconstruct the full historical complexity of pastoralism, mountain labor, or environmental governance in the region. Its strength lies in interpretive depth, thematic convergence, and the analytical value of situated testimony. That strength should not be mistaken for exhaustiveness. Further work could usefully extend the corpus geographically and socially, compare Serra da Estrela with other Portuguese or Iberian mountain regions, and explore more systematically the relations among oral history, public policy, heritage recognition, and climate adaptation.

Elements of nostalgia are visible in several testimonies and deserve critical attention. In contexts such as Serra da Estrela, marked by depopulation, environmental transformation or the decline of traditional ways of life, memories of the past are often narrated through idealized representations of rural life and environmental balance. Future research should therefore consider not only the processes of memory selection and reinterpretation through which interviewees reconstruct the past, but also what these narratives reveal about how communities produce meaning, identity and belonging in face of changing territorial realities.

The results also open several productive lines for future research. One concerns the relationship between oral history and participatory governance in UNESCO-oriented territories. Another concerns the role of memory in shaping public responses to fire, depopulation, and landscape change. A third, especially important, concerns the renewed relevance of pastoral mobility and other historically grounded practices in the context of climate disruption and regenerative land management. These directions suggest that oral history is not only a method for recovering disappearing worlds. It is also a means of engaging living questions about sustainability, resilience, and the future of mountain territories. Beyond its documentary value, participation in memory-sharing processes can itself strengthen individual and collective confidence, stimulate intergenerational dialogue, reinforce community recognition, and contribute to the social foundations upon which long-term stewardship and sustainability depend.

Taken together, the findings support a broader conclusion. In Serra da Estrela, oral history reveals that sustainability is not only a matter of environmental management, technological innovation, or institutional adjustment. It is also a question of memory, recognition, intergenerational transmission, and the cultural capacity to inhabit territory otherwise. The mountain emerges not as a passive landscape waiting to be governed, but as a lived environment whose ecological and cultural futures remain tied to forms of knowledge sedimented in practice, attachment, and community life. Recognizing these dimensions does not replace scientific expertise or policy planning. It strengthens them by reconnecting sustainability to the human, historical, and ethical conditions under which it becomes socially meaningful and democratically viable.