The road leading to Covas do Barroso, Portugal, an ancient village of about 120 people where the British mining company Savannah Resources wants to open one of Europe's largest lithium mines.COVAS DO BARROSO, Portugal — For centuries, Aida Fernandes’ family has lived in this village nestled in the rugged mountains that crown the northern border with Spain, with generation after generation grazing cattle and growing grapes in lush green fields.
Men had been showing up on lands owned collectively by the villagers for months. Fernandes and her cohort tried blocking the road when they saw them coming, but this afternoon she was too late. More workers were coming more often, with armed police not far behind — an intimidating sight for residents who lived through the fascist dictatorship that ruled Portugal from the Great Depression until the 1970s.
Next year, the firm is scheduled to start the real work on opening its Barroso mine, and plans to build a chemical plant next to the open pit to process the ore in-house. “There will obviously be an effort to develop as much upstream mining capacity in Europe as possible,” said Daisy Jennings-Gray, a London-based analyst at the market research firm Benchmark Minerals. “But no one is expecting Europe to suddenly become a huge mining region. Europe will probably never have a massive mining economy unless there’s a whole change in culture.”
If all goes according to plan, Savannah will complete its final feasibility study by the end of this year and advance to the last phase of the permitting process shortly afterward. Its prospecting work has continued.I arrived in Covas do Barroso less than two weeks after the prime minister resigned, with the goal of seeing the front lines of the European Union’s biggest “lithium war,” the hyperbolic term that journalists and advocates like to use for conflicts between miners and local opponents.
It also sweetened the deal for Covas do Barroso, according to João Cerejeira, an economist at the University of Minho who analyzed the Savannah project’s impacts.The company abandoned plans to operate 24/7, promised to impose strict time and noise limits on the mining operation, and budgeted to build a new road so its trucks don’t cause traffic.
a barber and artist who was also drawn here by the conflict, but found it so peaceful they decided to stay and set up a sanctuary retreat for queer people struggling with trauma.