Maré VerdeIt is where we remember who we are.
Women who chose this coastline — and in choosing it, made it theirs. Science that belongs to the community. Tourism that heals what it touches.
We train women as marine monitors and citizen scientists, mapping the invasive alga Rugulopteryx okamurae along Portugal's Atlantic coast. The ocean is everyone's home, not a resource to exploit — the Blue Commons, in economist Guy Standing's words.
Our monitors are trained, paid professionals — not volunteers. Gender equity is not a project add-on. It is the architecture of the project.
Here, you're not just a visitor — you take part. Alongside our guides, you monitor invasive species and contribute real scientific data, while the ocean calms your nervous system. This is regenerative tourism: personal healing and real action, on the same tide.
Join our monitors in an active field session. Document, identify and log invasive species, and leave with hands-on science and a recalibrated nervous system. No experience needed. Ocean empathy welcome.
Read the science: 2022 study · 2024 study
A low-tide walk along the rocky shore with a trained monitor. No swimming, no wetsuit — just hands, eyes, and the extraordinary world that appears when the ocean pulls back. Identify native and invasive species along the way. Suitable for all ages and abilities.
A full day at the Atlantic edge. Morning ocean meditation. Coastal monitoring activity. Shared local lunch. Optional snorkelling. A single day that resets the whole year.
We are launching our first pilot outings in Summer 2026. A small group of people will be the first to become citizens of this ocean. Leave your email and we will reach you before anyone else.
Every visitor leaves having contributed to real scientific data. That is not just tourism. That is citizen science.
Maré Verde is not waiting to begin. We are already in the water — alongside women of different origins and generations, conducting field outings to document invasive species and building ocean literacy from the ground up. Community engagement is not a future milestone. It is happening now.
Our formal consortium brings together municipal authorities and a research university committed to this coastline.
Maré Verde operates at the intersection of marine conservation, regenerative tourism, and community equity on Portugal's Atlantic coast. We are building partnerships with organisations that share our mission.
If you are an investor, foundation, impact fund, accommodation partner, or organisation working at the intersection of ocean health and social equity — we want to talk.
My path here began at a tide pool. As a child I would sit at the water's edge watching the small creatures, the shells, the colours in the sand, feeling completely at home. That peace — that sense of returning to oneself — is the thread that runs through everything Maré Verde is trying to offer.
Years later I learned to dive in Asia. Sailed the Atlantic after becoming a mother. And what I understood, slowly, is that the ocean never changed me. It kept confirming me. Across every continent, every version of my life — the same breath: slow, deep, surrounded by water.
Maré Verde was born from that certainty, built on the margins of my life — between a full-time job and raising my daughter.
"Blue Mind has always been here — in the rock pools of every child who grew up on this coast, in the hands of the women who mended nets and gathered shellfish, in the silence of a dawn sail on the Atlantic. Today it lives in the hands of other women who chose this coastline — surfers who stayed, immigrants who arrived, young women who didn't leave.
We are simply giving it a name, a structure, and a home."
Maré Verde is a movement still being built — and that is precisely the right moment to become part of it. People don't come back out of duty — they come back because they belong. You protect what you love, and you learn to love what you protect — the ocean, this coast, and, somewhere in between, yourself. In 20, 50 years, we want this still to be true. The Western Atlantic coast of Portugal is waiting. So are we.
