Month: February 2023

Portugal Road Trip – Part 3: Everywhere a Miradouro – Into the Douro River Valley

| 2suitcasesfor2years

Portugal is blessed with wonderfully diverse landscapes, making it a challenge for photographers like us to actually make any forward progress in a timely manner toward our ultimate destination. As we were constantly tempted to divert and explore a photo opportunity.  Fortunately, after a time the backroads from Ucanha narrowed. Only teasing us with vistas quickly glimpsed, as if shuffling a deck of cards, between houses hugging the road that snaked down into the Douro River Valley.  Whetting our enthusiasm for the days ahead. To our surprise we occasionally passed snowflake signs warning of wintry conditions that sometimes encompass the region. Something we had difficulty reconciling with our sunny view of Portugal, especially since we were experiencing a splendidly warm stretch of fine October weather.

The gate to Casa Vale do Douro slowly swung open to reveal a steep long driveway, which abruptly ended atop the edge of a high retaining wall. It could have been used by Portugal’s Ski Jumping team for practice, if they had one. The view was glorious. Maneul, the charming owner, helped us with the bags to our room. Within minutes we were ensconced in chairs on our balcony. Savoring our glasses of wine and the view. One of the things we appreciate about vacationing in Portugal, during the shoulder seasons, is that it’s still possible to find marvelous accommodations for under €100 a night, that include breakfast. We’d be calling Casa Vale do Douro home for the next three nights.

Incredible scenery attracted us to the Douro region, and we were not dissappointed, especially with the views from our room which faced due east. Brilliant sunrises transitioned to the river valley slowly being filled with fog.

Each morning we watched mesmerized as this ghostly blanket slowly engulfed buildings, vineyards and eventually us as we stood on the balcony. By ten o’clock it had usually burnt off.

The small village of Mesão Frio was a short walk from our guesthouse and as luck would have it, market day. Being mid-October, it was a smaller affair than what we imagined takes place during the high season, but it was still interesting enough, with cheese, meat and vegetable purveyors, along with hardware tents and garden suppliers selling seedlings for fall planting. With a round of Portuguese cheese and jamon secured for a picnic lunch later it was time to enjoy our, “walk a little then café,” break. Afterwards we wandered from one end of the village to the other, along the village’s main lane bordered on one side with a wide plaza and lined with shade trees. At the far end stood the Church of São Nicolau.

Tradition believes that the church was ordered built by Queen d. Mafalda, wife of d. Afonso Henriques in the 12th century, but the thickness of the church’s walls hint that it was constructed in the 14th century. Eighteenth century remodeling left the Baroque and Rococo character that’s visible today.  Several ancient stone sarcophagi, trapezoidal in shape, dating from the Medieval era stood under a side portico.

Heading back through the village we entered the Igreja de Santa Cristina, its interior now modestly decorated after it was looted and destroyed by Napoleon’s army during the Peninsula War of the early 1800s. Leaving only one bell tower that still stands today. It’s attached cloister, dating from 1724, was originally dedicated to Franciscan friars until 1834 when all male religious orders were banned from Portugal and their properties confiscated by the state.

Leaving many original stone details in place the building has been wonderfully repurposed as municipal offices. The most interesting detail a “janelas de vinho” or wine window from which wine used to be sold. The Regional Tourism Board located in the cloister has produced a very comprehensive 54-page Douro Tourism Guide that is a great resource and available to download for free. Listing an astonishing 120 major viewpoints, along with wineries, festivals, lodging, restaurants, and activities throughout the valley. There’s enough wonderful information in guide to encourage multiple vacations into the area.

After coffee, we drove leisurely along the north side of the river, stopping frequently to take photos. Driving through Peso da Régua to Covelinhas, where we followed the sinuous road high up into the mountains.

Occasionally passing olive groves and fruit orchards, their novelty highlighted by being oddities in a sea of grapes, until we reached the Miradouro São Leonardo de Galafura. At an elevation of 2100 feet it’s one of the highest viewpoints overlooking the valley.

Hawks circled on the thermal updrafts below us. As far as we could see, waves of undulating vineyards covered the hillsides, their pattern like a stone thrown into a pond. The unbroken views from the miradouro seemed if we were flying.  

Highly recommended by our host we dined each evening in Mesão Frio alternately at Tasca do Zéquinha an intimate rustic eatery with a silhouette of a wine cask hanging above the front door. Inside was a small bar packed with regulars. With a smile one pointed us upstairs when he saw our dismay that it was standing room only on the street level. Upstairs we were pleasantly greeted in a small dining room of eight tables. We enjoyed lamb chops, a rare and outrageously expensive menu item in the states, but well priced here and delicious. Fully sated, we were pleasantly pleased with how inexpensive appetizers, a house wine, dinner, dessert, and coffee were. In the Douro Valley the wine choices are infinite, or fathomless and as much as we enjoy wine, we are not knowledgeable oenophiles and are content with most restaurant’s house wines. Which in our experiences have found to be very good. 

The next night we ate at Convívio. Honestly, I can’t remember what we ordered, but we thoroughly relished the meal and the house wine. Here the house wine was a bottle of Serro d Asno, which featured a humorous illustration of a donkey’s ass. I’m not sure if the waiter was secretly a radical protesting the invasion of tourists into the Douro Valley or expressing his discontent with something I did not say, ha ha, my mind wanders. The wine was very good. Unfortunately, we haven’t been able to find it here in the states. For a change of pace we had dessert and coffee at Café Avenida, which features a tantalizing display case full of their divine homemade pastries. Staying open to 12AM, this quiet place is the ultimate experience for nightlife in Mesão Frio.

The waters of the Douro River rise in the mountains of central Spain, north of Madrid and flow of west for 557 miles before meeting the pounding waves of the Atlantic Ocean on the Portuguese coast at Porto. The famous region known for its production of Port, a fortified wine, encompasses 615,000 acres along 75 miles of river valley from the Spanish border to Mesão Frio.  

In September 1756 a Portuguese royal charter acknowledged the Douro River Valley as the exclusive region for the production of Port wine. Becoming the world’s first wine region to have a formal demarcation or DOC (Denominação de Origem Controlada).

Though renowned for its Port wines, today production is evenly divided with Douro table wines, which are gaining international recognition. Eighty different grape varietals, many native to Portugal, are cultivated in the region, but by far the most popular red grape varieties are Touriga Franca, Tinta Roriz, Tinta Barroca, Touriga Nacio, nal, Tinta Cao, and Tinta Amarela. While Rabigato, Viosinho, Malvasia Fina, Donzelinho, Gouveio, and Codega are the favored white varieties. Used alone to make full-bodied reds or delicate white wines they are also blended to create the beloved Port wines of the region.  Interestingly grapes growns for Port wine are planted on rocky schist areas while grapes grown for table wines favor a looser soil. The steep terrain of the narrow-terraced hills along the valley are no match for modern harvesting equipment, dictating that every September into early October the grapes are harvested by hand.

Small hamlets with parish churches of all different sizes are speckled across the landscape of the Douro Region. Picking one out on the map we headed to Cidadelhe for the Igreja de São Vicente. Built in the 1700s the stately baroque-style church is showing its age, with its textured graceful patina along with faded and peeling wood.

The backroads through the Douro Valley offered endless vistas of rolling hills and vineyards beginning to display their fall colors around every bend of the road. Fortunately, in October there were few cars or caravans on the roads and we able to stop often. With 119 official viewpoints in the region there’s and infinite number of photography worthy panoramas available just by pulling over onto the shoulder. The landscapes were endless. The fog intriguing.

We really didn’t have any solid plans for our time in the region. No must to this or that. Instead we chose, often remote miradouros on the map for our morning and afternoon destinations. The journey to reach them an integral part of the adventure.

We just brushed the surface of this alluring Douro Valley region. Hopefully, one day we’ll get a chance to return.

Till next time, Craig & Donna

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Portugal Road Trip – Part 2: For the Love of Guardrails

| 2suitcasesfor2years

To misquote RWE, “It’s the journey, but an interesting destination helps.” We left Tomar, destined for Piodão, one of the 27 Aldeias do Xisto, Schist villages, in the mountainous central part of Portugal. Only two and a half hours from Tomar, we rarely passed another car as we drove. Our route quickly transitioned to serpentine roads traversing rolling hills covered in eucalyptus and pine forest. Then the higher above the tree line we drove, an expansive vista of shrublands fielding heather, broom, carqueja and rosemary were revealed. Hair raising, twisting and turning roads would truthfully be a better description, made all the more unsettling because there seemed to have been a transportation department budget crisis, as in, they forgot to install guardrails on most of those mountainous roads! My wife’s knuckles were white from tightly grasping the “Oh Jesus” handle above her door. With all the gorgeous panoramas, they could have planned more miradouros for folks to safely enjoy the views from.

We are not novice mountain drivers, having taken many switchback roads to remote places on several continents, which has reinforced or belief in and appreciation for a nice sturdy guardrail when we see one.

This was also the day our moody rent-a-wreck of a car went psychotic, every warning light on the dashboard blinking violently in Portuguese, requiring us to pull over to check the vehicle. Reluctant to turn off the engine in such a remote area, we listened closely for any sounds of motor distress. The car sounded fine. We drove on. With a quick, blind left turn and an “Oh God!” we descended a steep single lane road on the far side of the village that eventually led us across terraced slopes to Casa da Padaria for the night.

With warm greetings and help with our bags Gorete, the innkeeper, showed us to our room. For many years, decades before its renovation, the inn served as the town’s bakery run by Gorete’s father in-law. She and her husband returned to the village and remodeled the original building into a small four-bedroom guesthouse. The bakery’s large brick oven still takes up one whole wall of the breakfast room, which also displays a huge dough trough and long wooden bread peels used to take the loaves out of the wood fired oven.

Schist, schist, schist, everywhere schist! Walls, roofs, cobbled lanes, terraces, everything in the village is built with this durable brown and grayish stone, from a distance giving it the appearance that it has grown organically from the earth of the box canyon that shelters cradles it.  Everyone’s blue doors and window frames are not the result of superstition to ward off demons or to bring good fortune, but a shop keeper buying many years’ worth of paint in only one color. It became tradition.  

Channeled narrow rivulets of cold mountain water run quickly between homes, under doorsteps and along the edges of walkways before cascading downhill into irrigation trenches for the terraced crops below the village.  Small fountains throughout the hamlet offer spring water for drinking and washing for some of the older homes that still might not have plumbing.   

Slowly exploring the village, we made our way to its central plaza for dinner at O Solar dos Pachecos and enjoyed delicious bowls of Moelas Guisadas a Portuguesa, stewed chicken gizzards. This dish might not be for everyone, but it is truly one of Portugal’s culinary treasures. The owner enthusiastically shared tidbits of information and pointed across the way to the only mailbox in this unique village for the 120 full-time residents left here. Pity the poor postman otherwise trying to figure out the twist, turns and stairways of the hamlet’s ancient lanes. Surely everyone gets to know one another this way with the mailbox strapped to a tree on the main square in front of the village’s only white-washed building, the church.  Before leaving he suggested we enjoy some of the hiking trails the area is known for with a short trek through the valley to Praia Fluvial de Foz d’Égua, a scenic spot with a suspension bridge over a stream that widens into a natural swimming hole. Later for coffee and dessert we watched part of a soccer game on the TV above the bar at O Fontinha.

Piodão owes its unadulterated charm to the fact that it was pretty much forgotten and slowly abandoned until the 1970’s when the donkey and horse trails leading to the village were replaced with roads carved into the isolating mountains of the Serra do Açor that surround it. It is located not far from Parque Natural da Serra da Estrela and continental Portugal’s highest peak, Torre at 6,539ft. Difficult terrain lured fugitives, seeking to escape justice, to the isolated villages of the area. Allegedly one of the assassins of D. Inês de Castro, the mistress of Pedro l, sought refuge here in the late 1300s. Other than that interesting historical footnote and mention in a 1529 census, folks got by on a subsistence economy of farming, grazing sheep and goats, along with wood and stone cutting for centuries.

Its rediscovery and revitalization in the 1980’s brought the isolated village built with the abundant local schist stone recognition as one of the “most Portuguese villages of Portugal,” with a Galo de Prata “silver rooster” award.  

Waking during the night to close the window against the mountain chill, I observed a full moon illuminating a single arched stone bridge over a babbling brook at the bottom of the valley. The mountain songbirds were loud enough to encourage an early wakening as the sun rose over the ridge behind the village. The next morning Gorete’s homemade jams, pastries and a neighbor’s artisanal cheese nourished us before we explored the village and moved on.

The drive to Praia Fluvial de Foz d’Égua was through forest thick with oak, chestnut and laurel cherry and arbutus trees. Arriving, we understood immediately why this beautiful area is such an out of the way tourist magnet. Traveling during the fall shoulder season, we were fortunate to experience the tranquility of this serene spot in solitude.

Continuing the next day, we headed north to Ucanha for its old Roman bridge with fortified tower that spans the Rio Varosa. In the off-season not as many restaurants are open, but we were fortunate to find Casa da Eira near the bridge still welcoming folks for a splendid meal.

The walk to it was down a lane bounded with high walls draped with bunches of grapes dangling beneath, the vines sporting brilliant fall foliage. Just before reaching the restaurant, we peeked through the broken shutters of a long-abandoned church, its wedding cake altar and walls stripped of any religious embellishments.

After lunch we strolled across the bridge and under its tower which served as a toll booth for travelers crossing the river and gateway to the vast land holdings of the Mosteiro de Santa Maria de Salzedas in the 1400s, and further on to the Portuguese frontier.  

The bridge we crossed is thought to have replaced an earlier Roman structure from the first century AD. Through the tower’s archway we followed the lane up to the village’s parish church, Igreja de S. João Evangelist, that dates from 17th century.

It was surprising to learn about the ancient Roman presence here in central Portugal, but we had already noticed signs for the old Roman route as we drove through the area and tried to find two ancient bridges nearby, the Ponte Românica de Vila Pouca de Salzedas and Ponte Romana without any success while on our way to Salzedas. In searching for them, we did however thoroughly enjoy an afternoon ride through tiny hamlets, vineyards, olive groves, and apple orchards, where the tastiest apples were plucked from a tree within reach of our car window.

Reaching Salzedas we parked and walked towards the monastery across a small bridge over a dry riverbed. Stopping across from the monastery to take a photo, we spotted the most unusual statue along the watercourse’s retaining wall: a carved stone sculpture of a naked man sitting with a huge serpent-head phallus bursting forth from between his legs. Its location across from the monastery was all the more bewildering, but we had to laugh. Odd, just really odd, some of the things you discover when you travel.

Shorter opening hours are one of the disadvantages of travel during the shoulder season as by the time we were done exploring the Mosteiro de Santa Maria de Salzedas the small cathedral next to it was closed. Having paid fully for our entry tickets, we were startled by the guard’s request request for coins. “Do you have any foreign coins? I don’t travel, it’s my hobby and I ask all the foreign visitors if they don’t mind sharing.”  Having collected foreign money ourselves we could relate to this desire to touch something of the outside world. “We have some somewhere in our suitcase. I’ll check before we go,” I replied. The attendant replied with a subtly disappointed, “okay.” We were sure he thought we were just giving an excuse as we climbed the stairs to the exhibition.

From its placement in 1155 near the Torno River, in keeping with the sect’s requirements that its buildings be near watercourses, this was one of the largest and wealthiest Cistercian monasteries in Portugal, having been gifted extensive land holdings, by a royal patron, with the express duty of exploiting the land for profit. A century later it was consecrated after the monastic complex was finished. Over the centuries it continued to be financed by various members of succeeding royal dynasties, perhaps seeking divine intervention or to influence the politics of the almighty Catholic church. Like all things old, it underwent several significant renovations during the 16th and 17th centuries. The addition of a second larger cloister in the 18th century left the façade of the monastery we saw today.

“Enough is enough, we’ve had enough,” could have been the chant of the Liberal government after their victory over the Absolutists at the end of the Portuguese Civil War, 1828 -1834, a war fought for basic human rights and to reverse centuries of disenfranchisement from autocratic monarchies and their allies, namely the Catholic church. Reforms started by the enlightened Marquês de Pombal in the mid-1700s to restrict the powers of old aristocratic families and the church with the expulsion of the Jesuits from the Portuguese Empire had stalled. In 1834 the new minister of justice, Joaquim António de Aguiar, enacted a law, The Extinction of the Religious Orders, requiring the dissolution of “all monasteries, convents, colleges, hospices and any other houses of the regular religious orders.” Their properties and moveable assets were to be nationalized and sold, the profits to be entered into the National Exchequer. Convents were allowed to stay open until the last nun died. Joaquim António de Aguiar earned the nickname, O Mata-Frades, “The Friar-Killer,” because of the anti-ecclesiastical spirit of this law. Over 500 monasteries were closed. Urban buildings were easily sold and repurposed, but many monasteries and convents in the rural areas were abandoned. Their religious art and iconography was redistributed to local parish churches, sold into private collections or “lost.” The Santa Maria de Salezadas Monastery sat abandoned and left to ruin for over 160 years until renovation work started in 2002 and culminated in the reopening of the cloisters in 2011 as a museum with displays of the monastery’s medieval and renaissance religious art and treasures recollected from afar.

With a wave and “thank you,” we left the monastery and headed to our car. “Wait, I’ve got to find those coins for you to take him.” Returning to the car with a smile on her face, Donna relayed that he was delighted that we remembered. A small connection.

It’s the journey. We headed to the Douro Valley. 

Till next time, Craig & Donna