Sunday, November 25, 2012

Natural Resources

Cork oaks, Alentejo
Alentejo landscape on a wintery day

In Portugal, the cork oak is part of the landscape in the Alentejo region. From the outer bark of this tree come the cork stoppers we find in every good bottle of wine.

In this photo, you can see where the outer bark has been removed.

Photo by Joergsam (Wikipedia), available under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

And here you can see a ceramic tile panel depicting workers removing that bark.


Portugal produces around 50% of the cork harvested annually worldwide, with Corticeira Amorim being the leading company in the industry, transforming the outer bark of the cork oak into cork stoppers and many, many other products.

This is my entry for Jake's Sunday Post challenge. Check out Jacksprinter to find links to other posts on this theme.





3 comments:

  1. Excellent post for this week theme Mara thanks for sharing my friend :)

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  2. I didn't know Portugal produces around 50% of the cork. Thanks Mara!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. That information is on Wikipedia. (I used to work for the largest cork producing group of companies in Portugal - I bet you didn't know that, either :-))

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