BOSK

The project

BOSK is a living forest planted in Évora's main public square. Across 2027, the year Évora is European Capital of Culture, around a thousand large trees in movable containers take over the Rossio de São Brás and are rearranged through the year, by machine and by residents, so that the square never looks the same twice. It is a public artwork, a gathering place and an urban ecology laboratory at once, and it is one of the structuring projects of the official Évora 2027 programme.

A forest that moves

BOSK is not a sculpture placed in a square; it is a forest that lives in one. Beyond the trees on the Rossio, five hundred shrubs travel further, in monthly Green Parades carried through the historic centre by volunteers, schools and local organisations, with music and street theatre along the way. Every Évora resident can collect a free tree on their birthday and care for it at home, before it is planted with hundreds of others in a new Happiness Forest. Around the square, a Living Lab brings artists, researchers, students and urbanists together on climate and public space, and an education programme puts children and students to work caring for the trees.

From Leeuwarden to Évora

The project is conceived by Bruno Doedens, a Dutch land artist who has spent two decades making temporary landscapes on dikes, dunes, beaches and polders, often at the scale of hundreds of metres. BOSK was first realised in Leeuwarden in 2022, as part of the legacy of that city's European Capital of Culture year, where a walking forest of more than a thousand trees crossed the city centre over one hundred days and won the Dutch Design Award. Évora's edition adapts that idea to the Alentejo: its light, its heat, its native species and its own relationship with time.

Why it matters

The Rossio is one of the hottest and most exposed public spaces in a city facing rising temperatures and water scarcity. BOSK's argument is that culture can be an instrument of climate adaptation rather than a commentary on it: shade, cooler air and biodiversity arrive as artistic consequences, and they stay. Nothing leaves Évora. When the year is over, the larger trees remain as a permanent micro-forest on the square, the rest are planted across the city and in a new environmental park, and a locally trained team of gardeners and a landscape architect carries the work on. A book and a film will record the forest for those who never walked through it.