Gouveia e Melo goes rafting on the Paiva River — watch the video
The jeep on the way to the boarding point on the Paiva River, in the municipality of Arouca, shows a landscape devastated by the wildfires. Henrique Gouveia e Melo, the sailor who commanded the Navy, today put on a wetsuit, lifejacket and helmet to go rafting in the river rapids, aiming to highlight the importance of “outdoor sports and nature tourism in an area that burned heavily last summer and to show the care needed to protect this heritage.” At 65, the retired admiral says he has nothing to prove when it comes to demonstrating health, vitality and energy, because almost all candidates try in some way to show their physical fitness. “I have nothing to prove. I left the Armed Forces less than a year ago. On my last mission, ask the people in the Navy what I did…” He says he is prepared. He has never done rafting. “What I did were things more violent than rafting” — on submarines and on ships. Gouveia e Melo justifies this campaign mise-en-scène by pointing to the country’s abandoned areas: “Not only are we seeing the interior become depopulated, but sometimes we don’t take care to bring economic activity to the interior, and that economy can often be provided by outdoor sports and nature tourism. It’s beautiful, we look around and what we see is a landscape badly burned, very destroyed.” “By coincidence, the Government is now preparing a decree-law on rivers and the protection of rivers. An advanced society understands the importance of nature, the impact humans have, and the care we must take to preserve it,” he states.
