In a wave of national solidarity, donations and emergency assistance have been flowing into the scattered hillside communities of central Portugal where devastating forest fires have claimed more than 60 lives this summer.

But the wounds exposed by the disaster and inflicted by decades of neglect, rural flight and remoteness from political power cannot be healed by aid alone.

“We have always been overlooked,” says Valdemar Alves, mayor of Pedrógão Grande, a small town 200km north of Lisbon where 64 people died in a catastrophic wildfire in June. “To many, we were just ‘the people from the hills’.”

His sense of abandonment is shared in sparsely populated villages across Portugal, where inhabitants feel they are forgotten communities living on the wrong side of a deep divide between the urbanised Atlantic coast and the poor, rural interior.

Centuries of hierarchical power fixed in Lisbon and entrenched by the authoritarian Salazar-Caetano regime between 1928 and 1974 have made Portugal one of the most centralised states in Europe, says Eduardo Cabrita, a minister in the Socialist government. This, he believes, has “set back the development of the whole country”.

It is harder for an economy to grow, he argues, when centralisation requires that “even the organisers of a beach volleyball competition in the north have to apply to the defence and environment ministries in Lisbon for authorisation”.

To remove such barriers, António Costa, prime minister, has charged Mr Cabrita with overseeing the first serious attempt in more than 40 years of democracy to devolve administrative power and give people like the residents of Pedrógão Grande more control over their lives.

Local government accounts for only 14 per cent of total public spending and 17 per cent of public sector employment, compared with EU averages of 25 and 36 per cent, respectively.

A punishing 2011-2014 adjustment programme, overseen by the EU and the International Monetary Fund, brought “terrible years” for local authorities, says Mr Cabrita. In the words of Pedro Cegonho, head of Portugal’s National Association of Neighbourhood Councils, “austerity policies and centralised government make an explosive mix”.

Scarce resources compounded by the limited powers available to Portugal’s municipalities and neighbourhood councils have fed into a rural exodus that has depopulated scores of villages. This, in turn, has widened the poverty gap between urban and rural areas, a gulf that was brought sharply into focus by the summer fires.

In Pedrógão Grande, where officials estimate the population has roughly halved over the past 50 years, the population density is 28 people per sq km compared with a national average of 112. One doctor tends to every 1,180 residents against one for every 205 people nationally. About a third of residents are over 65, an indication also of Portugal’s rapidly ageing population.

More than 60 people died when wildfires swept through Pedrógão Grande © AFP

“Marginalisation and desertification have created an imbalance that has to be corrected,” says Manuel Machado, mayor of the central city of Coimbra and head of Portugal’s National Association of Municipalities. “The old saying that ‘Portugal is Lisbon, the rest is countryside’ still holds true.”

In February, the government unveiled a decentralisation package comprising plans for 23 new laws and a reform of local government financing. A vote on the legislation has been pushed back until after local elections in October in an effort to reach a consensus on the proposals with opposition parties.

Apart from moving towards average EU levels of local government financing, the reforms aim to give local authorities significantly more powers over health, education, policing, transport and other public services.

In the area of fire prevention, for example, they will be able to determine forest management rules, choose what trees are planted locally and enforce the clearing of dangerous brush, which has spread widely as a result rural flight and ageing populations.

Shifting the balance of power away from Lisbon is expected to meet strong resistance from within the state bureaucracy. “Centralised states always tend towards concentrating power even further,” says Mr Cegonho, who is also head of the Campo de Ourique neighbourhood council in Lisbon. “They see centralised measures as the easiest way to achieve financial targets, but local decisions often make more productive use of public funds.”

For Mr Alves, who, like many of his peers, left Pedrógão Grande as a teenager, returning only four years ago, aged 64, to become mayor, what local people most want is to be heard. “With the right vision and the right input, we can make a future here,” he says.

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