ABSTRACT
The Algarve region, Southern Portugal, has some of the common history of other regions under gifted about power to make a fair control of their resources through public policies with regional/local basis. The consequences were out-migration and relative deprivation in human resources, which has the greatest evidence in the rough upcountry: the Caldeirdo mountains, known as ‘Serra do Caldeirao’. Mainly until seventies, Portugal revealed the traces of a country strongly dependent of both external resources and centralist political conduction. Since the 15th century, the history of the Portuguese discoveries is also the construction of a process of progressive ‘veneration’ of external realities and relative neglect of domestic affairs, which was driven by the political power established in Lisbon. In Portugal the 1970’s, economic crisis had mixed its consequences with the changing of political regime. Besides the national problems, in the Algarve we must add the negative effect of international crisis, which had deeply reduced the afflux of tourists.
