The exploration of Moinho dos Ilheus started in 1937, at the time of the big Spanish Civil War. Tio António (our uncle, great-uncle, great-great-uncle) used to tell us marvelous and weird stories of those times, of being by the sea at Moinho, and watching passing Spanish Navy boats manned by very young people – the older sailors would be fighting or dead.
The property is a mere 35 km away from the border with Spain and in many ways it was – as it still is – hard to tell the two countries apart, in geography as well as in the hardships and dreams of our Southern peoples.
He also would tell us why we were called Ilhéus – not our actual family name, but the name by which our family is informally known. It had its roots in the “Islander” – our forefather that came from Holland, via Azores, in the aftermath of the Liberal Wars of Portugal, around 1830, that marked the generalized end of Absolutism in Europe.
According to family mythology, this Northern Europe warrior came to find his beautiful Southern princess in the shores of Algarve, and here we are.
Moinho dos Ilhéus lies at an unique geographic position – right in front of the delta on which the sea enters the “Ria”, the body of water protected by the sandy barrier islands of what is one of the most beautiful marshlands on the planet.
At those times, there was a tuna net trap nearby – one of the most economically relevant forms of fishing in these areas at the beginning of the 20th century. The fishing of tuna involved the whole local population and one of the biggest “armação de atum” – Portuguese for Tuna Net Trap – of the region was in front of Moinho. It was on the sunken ruin remains of this Tuna trap that the writer of these lines learned to spearfish and skin-dive.
Because Moinho was so directly affected by the cyclical tides, our (father, grandfather, great-grandfather) José Simões Evangelista – a chemical engineer as innovative as his brother António – decided to invest in a tide activated turbine, to power a huge grain mill. This mill became the most important milling place in the whole region, and the cast of the innovative turbine still resides in the museum of LNEC, in Lisbon.
Both of them would later recollect with us the times in which the line of farmers waiting to use our mill would wind up the hill behind the property, disappearing beyond sight.
Later, after Second World War, the mill was stopped and Moinho started to produce a high quality millennial product: Sea Salt. In the ’70’s Moinho was producing up to 3.000 tonnes/year of the highest quality salt, which was sold all over the world.
There were many nights walking the walls of the salt-distillery to let the precious sea-water in, many days of hard work piling up the salt crystals in white mountains, many weeks of worry about the upcoming Autumnal rains.
To compound the natural beauty of Moinho, a myriad of migratory bird species congregated here each year to prepare to fly off South, or to nest. Nature doesn’t really pay much attention to formal human borders, and Moinho is in the middle of Ria Formosa’s Natural Park, the Portuguese extension of one of the largest protected marshlands in the planet, the Natural Park of Doñana, in Spain.
We grew accustomed to protect them and prize their beauty, their presence a sign of our peaceful relationship with local nature.
In the end of the 20th century, Moinho’s idiosyncratic qualities and geographical location captured the attention of Tiedemann Investment Group, which was then creating a large scale fish-farming project. The family rented out the property to the Investment Group, which created Timar, eventually the largest fish-farming company in the Iberian Peninsula.
During this period, the family took a secondary role, as the property was rented out to Tiedemann for the production of endemic fish species: Sea Bass and Sea Bream.
We tended to other things in the meantime – the family’s farm-house is a couple of km away from Moinho, and some of us moved from Lisboa down to Algarve, in search for the uniquely better quality-of-life that the Portuguese south coast has to offer – and in 2007-2008 we learned that Timar’s project had met financial hardships, and that we would be regaining control of our beloved land once again.
At that point, second-generation Margarida Sena Simões and Rosário Barrote took over and it became apparent that such an extraordinary place had to be honored with an extraordinary project. We decided to rearrange part of the property to allow for the production of oysters with no interference of any motorized or otherwise artificial means – to produce the best oysters in the world, organically, biologically, with the smallest ecological footprint possible.
This is our identity: Three generations committed to producing the best the ocean has to offer… and soon onto the fourth generation.