The shelter that fostered a whole town

Vilarinho do Ar is a village of 312 people in the hills above Braga. Five years ago, it was on the slow decline that maps of inland Portugal show in muted greys. Today, it has 312 people, 84 dogs, and a foster network that other rescues drive an hour to study.

It started, as these things often do, with a single person. Marina ran the village café. A litter of puppies appeared on the road behind the church. She kept three; the rest needed homes. Her café became, by accident, a place where neighbours dropped in to meet the puppies and, less by accident, took them home.

Marina is now the formal coordinator of a foster programme that runs out of three village houses, two of which were empty before she rented them for the dogs. The mayor describes it, only half-joking, as the village's main industry.

What works in Vilarinho is not the model — every village is different — but the recognition that fostering is a community practice, not a personal one. People share supplies. People watch each other's dogs while one foster goes to a wedding. People talk about the dogs when they pass on the street, the way a different kind of village might talk about the football scores.

We spent a week there because we wanted to see what the data couldn't tell us about successful rescue networks. The answer, in the end, was the most obvious thing: the network is the point. The dogs are the reason, but the network is the point.