The Government of the Azores resorted to the figure of recognition of the public interest so that there is allowed the partial occupation of lands of the Regional Ecological Reserve of the Furnas Lagoon, during the first phase of the works of requalification of the respective margins.

The decision of the Executive of Carlos César, made real in a dispatch of the secretary for the Environment and the Sea, alleges the non-existence of “technical or economically more viable alternatives” to which the Society of Promotion and Environmental Management, Spraçores, SA, intends to implement in the framework of that project, guaranteeing that the planned intervention will “always have in account the safeguard of the lagoon”.

As he adds, activities are foreseen at the level of the stabilization of the slopes, recuperation with indigenous vegetation of the adjacent areas to the lagoon and protection of the bed of the lines of water, with reduction of its speed of drainage and of the volume of the solid material that reaches the mass of water.

The construction of monitoring and investigation centre of Furnas and of attached building appoints other one of the components of an intervention faced like an “added value for the area at issue, as soon as it intends to create conditions for a more orderly visitation and consequently with less impact” in environmental terms.

Legislation of 2006 considers the “natural margins, adjacent humid zones and a belt of protection delimited from the line of maximum flooding” like integrant parts of the Ecological Reserve, obliging to the publication of special standards for effects of interventions in the spaces in reference.