Walking in Portugal

One can’t talk about walking in Portugal without talking about the National Park Peneda Gerês, or just Gerês as we usually refer to it here.

We have quite a good number of protected areas in Portugal but we only have one national park and that is Gerês.

Gerês is located up north and its northern boundaries are part of the frontier between Portugal and Spain, please check the little map inserted in this post - is an image from Wikipedia.

The Park was established in 1971 and occupies an area of 70 000 hectares (172 974 acres) which is around 1% of the Portugal's territory … that can give you an idea of how important is the National Park for us.

I’ll not go through all the data concerning the Park, for that you can access to Wikipedia (click here) and you will find a lot of common knowledge. I rather prefer tell you what can you expect by going there and some of my own  thoughts about it.

Gerês is very much linked with the Portuguese concept of outdoors, into the wild, Nature and green landscapes with huge rounded granite stones.

I remember when I started with my tour leading professional activities, everybody was asking me if I was taking my guests to Gerês, they was not asking any other places, just about Gerês.

Like Portugal in general, Gerês is a quite diverse area. During the summer, if you go walking there, you will find beautiful waterfalls and lovely green small hills but you can also find warm, dry, hard landscapes and that is part of its beauty.

Personally I prefer to go there during spring or fall, especially fall with the brown, red and yellow colors, very nostalgic. Spring is a cheerful season with light green tonalities and small flowers everywhere ... quite lovely.

A distinctive feeling of Gerês is an atmosphere of mysticism … witches, spelling,  uuuuuuu, scary ehehehe. In fact there is an yearly fair of the occult in a small village called Vilar de Perdizes close to the Park.

A few years ago some wolfs returned to the Park and all the country was quite proud, it was breaking news in all TV channels. Don’t be afraid because you won’t see them, they suffered too much and for too long with mankind so they are quite well hidden in the woods way from everybody.

In Gerês there are a lot of animals you may easily find by walking there, small animals I mean, also quite a number you will only find in posters, unless if you are an expert hiker.

Walking in Gerês you will find garrano horses (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garrano ) and the barrosã cow, both local breeds. Boars are also quite common, however also very difficult to see because they are hunted.

Another local breed, but quite often not considered in tourist information, is the Castro Laboreiro dog. This dog breed has a quite rough look, is a hard working cattle dog and has an interesting characteristic, instead of licking the water to drink it like any other dog, he sips the  water as wolves do.

For those who loves flora this is the place to see impressive woods of English oak (Quercus pyrenaica) and plenty of lily’s that grow everywhere. You can find here an herb called “Hipericão-do-gerês” (tutsan - Hypericum androsaemum L.) from which you can make a nice infusion, the flavor and smell I remember from when I was a kid in my grand-mothers place.

Some other animals can be found in the Park like golden eagles, roe-deers and many others but more difficult to find.

There many ways of accessing to the Park, personally I prefer two of them:

- Campo do Gerês (clic here to see where it is)

- Mezio (clic here to see where it is)

The entrance via Campo do Gerês gives the visitor a direct door to Nature. From here you will access an unpaved road where you will find the river Homem (means man) and many waterfalls and places to take a swim – the water is quite cold.

Going through Mezio you will access Soajo, a small village where you can see a national monument called Espigueiros.

An “espigueiro” is a place to store corn, a stone construction with a very peculiar shape.

At Soajo you will find 24 espigueiros close to each other, some of them are dated from late XVIII century AD, when the corn was brought to Portugal from the New World.

This post is getting too long and there are so much to say about Gerês that later I will have to write a few posts more about Gerês.

To be continued …

David Monteiro

Açorda and Migas

In this post I will be talking about regional Portuguese cooking.

Before I explain what an açorda or a migas are I will start by saying that they are two Portuguse regional dishes that, by an unknown reason, most of Portuguese people confuse  them with the exception of the alentejanos, of course.

Alentejo is the region south of the River Tagus.

In Portuguese, Alentejo means beyond the Tagus and that was what the ancients knew much time before Portugal was born as an independent country, before the VIII century AD.

During the Moorish invasion (VIII AD) the Moorish started to call “al gharb” to the southern part of Portugal.  “al gharb” means “the west” and, in fact, that territory was their western land.

With the Moorish occupation Alentejo was confined to the land between the river Tagus and the “al gharb”, the actual Algarve.

In Alentejo the cereal fields are quite abundant. And you will find the largest Portuguese lowland area, excellent to grow cereals such as wheat. Consequently bread became an important element in the local gastronomy along History.

It has always been a poor and sparsely populated region so, bread is a valuable food resource being both abundant and inexpensive. Still today you will find several dishes in which bread is present such as migas and açorda.

The bread from Alentejo is extraordinarily good, heavy and you can preserve it for a quite some time.

Migas

Imagine a dish where you will have hard bread soaked in hot water, mixed with meat’s sauce and fried up until it becomes roll like an omelet.

The meat was seasoned with ground pepper and garlic on the day before than you will take it to the pan adding some water to don’t stick. From here you will get some sauce you will use to  fried up the migas like was said before.

Serve the migas together with the meat and some orange and VOILá :) ready to be appreciated at your table :)

Açorda

It’s a soup made with bread, coriander, garlic, salt, water, poached egg and olive oil.

Some people would prefer the bread in small pieces and some people will prefer to wait until the bread gets softer.

Now that you know what migas and açorda are I will be waiting for you com come to Portugal to taste them or cook them with me :) it will be fun.

David Monteiro

During the XVII century the British were importing huge quantities of Portuguese wine that were transported until the UK by sea.

Unfortunately, due to the severe conditions of shipping at that time, the wine often soured. So they started to add alcohol to keep the wine in good conditions until arriving to its destination.

By that time the sailors realize that besides increasing the alcoholic grade, which was already very appreciated by them, the alcohol enhanced the wine flavor and aroma and that was allegedly the beginning of the Porto Wine.

Well … if we believe in this story so the Bristish was right in claiming they was the “inventors” of the Porto Wine.

However … yes, there is always an “however” in every story ehehehe … however, we know that this method of add alcohol to the wine during the shipping is much older than that. The Portuguese navigators of the XV century were already using it. So, what can we say?

The first record we have about a “Vinho do Porto”, or Porto Wine, being shipped from Portugal is dated from 1678.

The wine was growing and being produced in the Douro Valley and transported to Vila Nova de Gaia in wooden boats called “Rabelo”. Vila Nova de Gaia is the city in front of Porto, on the other river bank. Finally the wine was shipped from Porto area and that is why was known by the name of Porto Wine.

As you can imagine the amount of business originated by the wine selling to the UK was quite important for Portugal. The Portuguese are/were not different from the rest of the humans worldwide and they started to decrease the quality of the wine and increasing the profit … not very clever nor original at all … and that happened until a point that the business was at stake.

By mid-eighteenth century the Portuguese king D. José I was ruling the country and his Prime Minister was a man called Sebastião José de Carvalho e Melo, known as Marquis de Pombal.

Marquis de Pombal was a very tough man, after the Lisbon 1755 earthquake he punished quite severely who was caught stilling from the city wreckage and he had his reputation from many other similar situations.  With the objective of protecting the Porto Wine business, which was very important for the country, in between many other measures he established the Demarcated Wine Region of the Douro in 1756.

That is how was born the oldest demarcated wine region in the world and until today it stays more or less with the same configuration, with some modifications of corse.

In 2001 UNESCO recognized the Douro Valley as a World Heritage Site:

“Criterion iii The Alto Douro Region has been producing wine for nearly two thousand years and its landscape has been moulded by human activities. Criterion iv The components of the Alto Douro landscape are representative of the full range of activities association with winemaking – terraces, quintas (wine-producing farm complexes), villages, chapels, and roads. Criterion v The cultural landscape of the Alto Douro is an outstanding example of a traditional European wine-producing region, reflecting the evolution of this human activity over time.”

Douro Valley photos at Flickr, clic here

If you want to tour and know the Douro Valley contact me: david.jose.monteiro@gmail.com

Drink a glass of Porto Wine with your friends and have fun.

David Monteiro

Some important links if you want to know more about this subject:

Região Vinhateira do Alto Douro (Wine Region of High Douro) - http://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regi%C3%A3o_Vinhateira_do_Alto_Douro#Divis.C3.A3o_Geogr.C3.A1fica

Alto Douro Wine Region, UNESCO World Heritage Site –http://whc.unesco.org/en/list/1046

Douro DOC – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douro_DOC