This is our 100th blog post! Holy cow, that's a lot of adventure in 18 months. The blog has become pretty unwieldy to take in all at once, but you can scan for dates and search for specific things by clicking on the hamburger (three horizontal lines) in the upper left corner of each post. It's fun for us to review too; it's like a big diary.
Saturday Dec 27 was clear and bright, so we took the day off and went on a road trip. Pat plotted a route along the small byways, roads we had mostly not been on, north to Valença on the Spanish border to see the Fortaleza (fortress) there. It was a beautiful drive through the Portuguese countryside. The fortress is a huge well-preserved medieval castle, including walls, grounds, and a village within, but was completely overwhelmed with tourists on this sunny Saturday during the Christmas holidays. Gerrit said it reminded him of Venice: a beautiful tourist attraction except for the tourists. We crept through traffic into the little village inside the castle walls, found that parking was already overflowing, and crept back out to try again when the crowds are thinner.
Next we drove to Mosteiro de Sanfins, an ancient monastery which is a little southeast of Valença. This was the complete antithesis of the fortress we had just seen. It was tranquil, natural, and we were the only people there. We wandered around the moss-covered ruins of the medieval monastery, peering into the small, unheated, stone, monks' cells and admiring the ancient walls and arches. We thought about the incredible work that would have been required to raise and set the granite blocks into position in the middle ages, or to build the beautiful, ornate self-supporting archways. There were narrow vertical slits (archer's windows) in the monastery itself, too, evidence of the need for self-defense even in a monastery. There were indications of cannon ball strikes on the outer walls too. Such a soft, easy, and luxurious life we lead now, we reflected as we eased back into our comfortable automobile and drove off.
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The original monastery
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Outside grounds
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Inside the ruins
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Arches
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Corridor of monks' cells
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A monk emerges from his meditations
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Torre de Lapela was the next stop: the tower which remains from a medieval fort. The castle itself was demolished in 1706 to provide stone for a nearby project, but the tower was left intact. We walked around and gazed up at the imposing granite structure, but the steep stairs were too much for us so we restricted our admiration to gazing.
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Granaries in front of the tower
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Seems a little steep
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We took another winding beautiful drive home following unfamiliar back roads through unfamiliar villages in the Portuguese countryside:
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Not far from Retorta (2F4M+FGV map coords) |
Village of Castanheira (seen from XG4G+MFH) |
As the leaves began to fall, we noticed what looked like a huge hornet nest about 10 m (30 feet) up in a tree in the neighbor's lot across the way. Here is a seriously zoomed-in photo. A couple weeks later this red and white ribbon appeared, attached to the bottom. Pat found that this is a sign that the authorities have destroyed the inhabitants of an Asian Hornet nest and not to touch it. They also place a marker at the base of the tree. We thought this was a nice example of the government responding to a reported dangerous condition and taking quick action.
The weather has been very nice the past few days and Christmas lights are still up, so after sundown on Sunday Dec 28 we took a drive to see some more of them. There are only a few houses which have significant lights up, but Ponte de Lima looks like a birthday cake. You see "Boas Festas" (Happy Holidays) all over.
There are lights at each entry road into town. Here are all but one, which we couldn't get a clear shot of:
And here are some of the other light shows in our village and downtown. 2025 is the 900th birthday year of the town of Ponte de Lima (the oldest chartered town in Portugal), and you can see banners and lights commemorating that.
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Our village church
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Ponte de Lima old town
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Happy 900th birthday!
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Wishing you 900 more!
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Downtown historic district
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Nativity scene downtown
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We also got some shots looking across the Lima river and back at the town and medieval bridge:
(As usual, you can click on any photo to enlarge it, scroll through them all, and click outside a photo when you're done. Also, you can click on the bold underlined phrases to play the audio.)
