Portuguese Douro wine region walking holiday

Planet

Travel and tourism are responsible for around 5% of global CO2 emissions. Our challenge is to prepare for a low-carbon society by further reducing our environmental impacts, while ensuring we preserve tourism’s social and economic benefits – both for the host community and for our customers.

We take into consideration environmental issues when planning new programmes within Northern Portugal and design them to have negligible harmful impact. To achieve this, we follow the guidelines laid out by the Portuguese Nature Conservation and Forestry Institute (ICNF), which protect and preserve the areas of natural beauty and environmental significance in which we operate.

We provide our self-guided clients with a full briefing and detailed instructions of their route, which includes a traveller’s code of conduct. This includes guidelines for avoiding damage to the landscape and advice on minimising waste.

The use of transport on our walking programmes is kept to the bare minimum – walking circular routes or village-to-village is the standard. When taxis are required, we use local drivers to reduce carbon emissions.

People

Rural Northern Portugal suffers from depopulation as young people tend to head to the cities for work, leaving older generations to manage on subsistence agriculture. That’s why we make sure our programmes not only bring money into these marginalised communities, they also make local people feel appreciated and motivated.

Our guides live in the areas in which they work. We meticulously screen all of the service providers that we work with, ensuring that they operate in a professional, reliable manner and also that they have a certain distinctive authenticity and a genuine desire to share their enthusiasm with our visitors in a way that fits with our responsible travel policy.

We are committed to working with local partners to help them adhere to quality standards without losing their genuineness and to cooperate with others to support the fledgling tourist industry that is providing these remote, underpopulated areas with a more promising future.

We ensure that local suppliers and operators receive a fair rate for their services and support and encourage fair employment practices.

Running our office in a responsible manner and monitoring and reducing our energy usage as well as recycling is part of the culture we are developing.