The following is a condensed version of comments made by John Tranmer, Managing Director of AlmaVerde Village & Spa at the SB10 regional conference on Sustainable Building held at the Hilton, Vilamoura on 17 – 19 March, during the Plenary Session VII Financing and procurement.
John Tranmer
Our own local guru of sustainable tourism and yoga teacher Gordon Sillence is asking us all to support the UN-backed idea of 16 days of Worldwide Truce during the London 2012 Olympics.
Gordon Sillence
An exhibition by Polish artist Kasia Wrona entitled “Flames of Inspiration” opens at the Lagos Cultural Centre on 27th March and will run until 22nd May.
“Flames of Inspiration” is an exhibition of works primarily inspired by the intense and disturbing experience felt by the artist during and following the forest fires that devastated Serra de Monchique in 2003
Kasia Wrona
Homes Overseas Magazine interviewed Tom and Gill Blades from Streatham, London, who have been living in Algarve since 2006.
Tom Blades, 60, a composer and Gill, 53, a freelance counsellor, had originally planned to buy and renovate a Portuguese farmhouse. Tom said:
“We did not want to buy on a golf course or similar development. But we were attracted by the thinking behind AlmaVerde and impressed by the quality and type of construction and villa styles.”
The following notes were originally prepared for a panel entitled “The Challenges and Rewards of Sustainable Development” at the OPPLive! Property Show at London’s ExCeL on 23rd October, 2009, chaired by Gordon Miller of www.whatgreenhome.com.
Here are some commonly used definitions:
Sustainability, in a broad sense, is the capacity to endure. In ecology, the word describes how biological systems remain diverse and productive over time. For humans it is the potential for long-term maintenance of wellbeing, which in turn depends on the wellbeing of the natural world and the responsible use of natural resources.
One thing is clear: the desire to own an overseas property is as strong as ever. Statistics of people browsing overseas property websites are on the up, and, with the demise of “emerging markets”, interest in the Algarve, as a safe, well-established market with a strong tourism infrastructure and planning controls, is greater than ever. However, over the past year, with the financial crisis and sterling languishing against the euro, actual buyers have been thin on the ground.
Event date: 19 -20 September
In past years, the market for Algarve leisure real estate has been propelled by the British and Irish, but the recent demise of sterling and the plight of the Irish economy have prompted developers to start looking in other directions.
Scandinavians have not been buying Algarve property in numbers, but there is anecdotal evidence that they are now becoming more active. There are now flights to Faro on Norwegian Air Shuttle from the capital cities of Oslo, Stockholm and Copenhagen, and Scandinavian currencies have remained relatively firm against the euro.
Silves Art Exhibition
Running from 21 June to 27 September
One of the events in this summer’s Allgarve cultural program is the Exhibition: “Blink -print works from the CAM collection”* taking place in Silves, at the House of Islamic and Mediterranean Culture.
The sub-title of this exhibition of engravings: “Deciding in the blink of an eye”, originates from a story about the authenticity of a Greek statue Kouros*, acquired in 1985 by the J. Paul Getty Museum**. The last decade has seen a maturing of photographic and digital image manipulation, but from its inception engraving broadened the sphere of artistic creation, by enabling works to be repeated through stamping so that they could be accessed and owned by a larger audience.
With effect from 17th September, 2009, Portuguese financial institutions and branches in Portugal have been prohibited by the Bank of Portugal from extending credit to entities in so-called tax havens considered un-cooperative or whose ultimate beneficiary is unknown.
The Bank of Portugal considers a tax haven as a jurisdiction that “aims to attract a significant volume of business with non-residents, particularly due to the existence of less stringent procedures for obtaining authorization under the banking and supervisory regime in respect of banking secrecy, tax advantages, differentiating in the law between residents and non-residents or enabling the setting up of special purpose vehicles.”