Having occupied a leading position as an export product, wine production and vine growing in Portugal are still highly relevant and deserve a dominant place in the Portuguese economic and social landscape. The objective of this work is to contribute to an analysis of the current state of development of Portuguese viticulture and viniculture, analysing the importance of regional origin in the composition of prices in the Portuguese market. Using a hedonic model and online data from a large retailer in Portugal, we are able to identify the regional premiums for Portuguese wines in the internal market. Furthermore, we assess AOC recognition and region-specific premiums, and we obtain evidence of differences in the price contribution of denomination of origin from different regions.

Over the past few decades, tourism has come to be considered a way of promoting economic and social development in peripheral, rural areas where traditional agriculture has declined. This is the case of the Portuguese region of Serra da Estrela, where rural tourism has been seen as a strategy for regional development. However, it is important to understand the extent to which tourism activities are able to meet the expectations of tourists and entrepreneurs, in order to represent a realistic development strategy. The current exploratory study compared the performance of 42 small tourism businesses operating in Serra da Estrela in an attempt to understand the impact of several factors on their success. Using occupancy rate as an indicator of success, a linear model was estimated, revealing the importance of adopting information and communications technologies (ICT) in tourism service as a factor for success. The study also shows that the supply of other services, besides housing, and client satisfaction promote the increase in net occupancy rates. Contrary to expectations, two of the explanatory variables related to management (owning and living in the touristic unit) have a negative impact on success.

Agro-pastoral systems in southern European regions have been subjected to various disturbances in the past few decades. Still, a certain amount of resilience allowed to withstand its sharp decline. The Serra da Estrela cheese production, the most representative agro-pastoral system of the Portuguese Centro Region, is a demonstrative case study. The main objective of this research is to understand the trajectory of this system up to present, its adaptation to internal and external changes and evolution trends. We used the concepts of resilience and socio–ecological system as framework in a qualitative study. Participatory methods were applied using the perspectives of local actors, in order to identify and analyze the key factors. The main drivers are socio-demographic (ageing, depopulation, social perception of the profession), economic (free market, industrialization), political (lack of adequate of national and European policies) and environmental (climate change, forest fires). Our results are in line with other European cases. To cope with these trends, the system is irreversibly transforming, moving into a new trajectory characterized by different systemic architecture. In face of the ongoing changes, the interactions between the social and the ecological subsystems are blurring, whereas local communities and traditions are being excluded.

The agronomical, cultural, and historical importance of local varieties and the need of structured preservation of genetic resources have been widely recognized at both political and scientific levels in the past decades. To be engaged in genetic resource preservation, farmers must find it rewarding. Besides public policies, the generation of benefits depends crucially on the revenues farmers can collect through product sales, which, in turn, depends on consumers’ preferences. If consumers are willing to pay a price premium that rewards farmers for the lower productivity and greater variability usually associated with traditional varieties, market can make a significant contribution to agrobiodiversity preservation. However, knowledge about consumer’s willingness to pay (WTP) for traditional varieties is scarce and the main research on this topic focuses on particular varieties making it difficult to generalize the results. This study, rather than determining consumers’ WTP for a specific variety, seeks to estimate the WTP for the attribute “traditional variety” itself, using a hedonic price model. In-store Becker-DeGroot-Marschak auctions were applied for data collection. Results show that consumers, depending on their socio-economic characteristics, are willing to pay for the feature “traditional variety”.

The valorization of cultural heritage very often means the search for new uses and rationales for material items that have lost their usefulness or intangible cultural expressions in risk of disappearing. These new uses may ensue from heritage processes through which material or intangible assets acquire values of cultural identity. This requires a process of legitimization, either through academic study, public recognition, or valorization by the market, among others. Based in regional and national periodicals information and semistructured interviews with key informants, this article examines a case in which such a process was legitimized through the market, by means of which a medieval abandoned village, Póvoa Dão, in the district of Viseu (central Portugal), was restored and given a new use in the tourism industry. The village was completely rebuilt in accordance with an architectural plan that respected the original design. The process began by creating market value for a set of buildings as well as for a number of goods and activities that derive directly from its location in a rural area, such as gastronomy and agricultural activities carried out according to traditional methods. The article concludes that the market can play an important role in the valorization of heritage and contribute to create identity and cultural value after rehabilitation. New forms of sociability are identified in the "new" village in contrast to the old rural sociability. last, but not the least, this study looks into some of the ways in which villages rehabilitation can contribute to local development.