Melgaço: recycled Christmas decoration

This year the City Hall took a different approach in regards to Christmas decoration in Melgaço. It’s no secret that the Portuguese government is cutting on a lot of unnecessary expense this year and it seems the local city hall added some ecological thinking to it and the result is that this year we have the streets decorated with plastic bottles, cans, wires and old CDs. Hope they saved the taxpayers money with this. Watch the photos and judge the results for yourself in the comments section.

More Christmas Trees

Santa is rubbish

Christmas Trees 2010

Oranges!

Artistic decoration?

Happy Holidays

Cans, CDs and bottle caps

Can Christmas Tree

For more information about Melgaço please visit the other posts in this category.

Photos taken in December 13th 2010

Melgaço: Wind Turbines

Wind Turbine 1

Since 2007, some mountains in Melgaço have become populated by large wind turbines for electric energy production. This change in the landscape is noticeable in any clear day from Vila. The town always seemed surrounded by mountains, now tall white turbines guard the top of these mountains with their spinning blades. I think it is a small price to pay considering the benefits for the environment.

Melgaço is one of the municipalities covered by the “Alto Minho Eolic Park” or “Alto Minho Wind Farm“, an investment of more than 340 million Euros in northern Portugal, creating a 240 megawatt park with 120 wind turbines. From the newspapers I found it creates 1,25% of the electricity used in Portugal, with an annual production of 55million Euros worth of electricity. It is said to save the production of 466 thousand tons of CO₂ for year.

Here are some photos of the turbines:

Turbines at Sunset

Turbines and Snow

Wind Turbines in the mountains

persons nearby for scale

Wind Turbine 1

For more information about Melgaço please check the other posts in this category.

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This post will be updated if I upload more photos from the wind turbines.