What’s Next for Portugal’s Ancient Export: Cork?
The Food Programme
BBC
4.4 • 976 Ratings
🗓️ 13 March 2026
⏱️ 43 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Leyla Kazim reports from cork country in Portugal - where up to 10,000 of hectares of cork oak trees are being lost every year, despite laws protecting them from being cut down. Climate change is putting new stresses on the ancient forests, and as the cork industry worries that falling wine consumption could shrink global demand, Leyla asks why Portugal became the world’s biggest producer of cork in the first place, and what it will take to keep them thriving. She meets farmers using regenerative methods of working the land to protect the montado, and plantations where thousands of new trees are being planted.
Presented by Leyla Kazim Produced in Bristol for BBC Audio by Natalie Donovan
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | BBC Sounds, Music, Radio Podcasts. |
| 0:05.6 | Hello, I've just nipped in before your BBC podcast starts to tell you all about |
| 0:09.4 | You're Dead to Me. We're the comedy podcast that takes history seriously. Also from the BBC |
| 0:13.9 | and presented by me, Greg Jenner. I should have told you that at the beginning. Sorry. |
| 0:17.9 | Anyway, like many other BBC podcasts, such as Desert Island Discs, Evil Genius, or In Our Time, your dead to me is available first on BBC Sounds, |
| 0:26.3 | a whole month earlier than anywhere else, in fact. So if you can't wait another day to hear |
| 0:31.2 | the very latest in history and loads of other good stuff, then listen first on BBC Sounds. |
| 0:41.0 | Wait. of other good stuff, then listen first on BBC Sounds. We're inching our way up at 3km farm track in southern central Portugal. |
| 0:48.0 | That's the sound of my little car taking on the thick mud of the allentasium. |
| 0:55.2 | The sheer amount of mud is very unusual, but January and early February brought weeks of |
| 1:02.3 | unrelenting rain and wild storms to Portugal. It damaged roads, it felled trees, and here |
| 1:09.1 | it's left the track pothold, puddled and thick with claggy mud. |
| 1:15.9 | As the track winds through the farmland, hundreds of cork oaks come into view, dotted across the fields, spaced out, some 10 or 20 metres apart. |
| 1:29.3 | This isn't thick woodland, but miles of trees with a lot of light in between them. |
| 1:35.3 | And it's easy to tell that they're corks. |
| 1:38.3 | Their trunks are a dark reddish brown, stripped of their bark, and some of the thicker branches can be too. |
| 1:45.6 | Look at this one, this one's dead, but wow, imagine the critters in that. |
| 1:53.0 | Very old. |
| 1:54.3 | So why exactly am I bumping through the mud to look at cork trees? |
| 2:00.0 | I'm Leila Kazim and it all started last year when I left |
| 2:04.6 | the UK for Portugal. A story you might remember from the episode The New Good Life. The summer before I |
| 2:12.3 | moved, I posted on social media about a little wine festival that had blown me away. |
... |
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