Porto's São Bento Station would make the start of any train journey seem like a special occasion. It's more like a palace than a hub of public transport, with mosaic murals made from Portugal's signature ceramic tiles covering every inch of the walls and ceiling, depicting country folk from some long-gone and probably imaginary era. And then there's the floor. It's not like most station floors. No constellations of masticated and discarded chewing gum or odd sticky patches here. It's insanely clean: there must be a team of workers labouring day and night to ensure that any travellers feeling peckish could simply sit down and lay out a picnic on the concourse. No wonder it is one of Portugal's national monuments and even a UNESCO World Heritage Site. AND the train was precisely on time. AND the ticket for a two and a half hour journey down the Douro Valley cost the princely sum of about £11.
So, our train journey started well. It might not have ended so well, were it not for the vigilance of the ticket inspector. As the towns grew smaller, the river grew wider and the vine-covered mountains more impressive. At last, the next stop was Ferrão, where we were to get off. A couple of times, the train had stopped to allow the service travelling towards Porto to pass it. When it stopped once again in the middle of nowhere, we simply stood by the door, with our back-packs on, ready to alight at the next station. Nothing happened. We stood there. Fellow travellers looked out of the windows and admired the view across the water to the steep vineyards on the other bank.
It was an afternoon of heat. There was perfect silence. There was no steam to hiss, but somebody cleared his throat and a blackbird sang. It was a Portuguese Adlestrop. Nothing continued to happen. We carried on standing by the door, also admiring the vineyards and wondering whether we should put our packs down in case it was a long wait. The previous stops hadn't been this long.
Eventually, the ticket inspector appeared. "Ferrão", he said, eyebrows raised. He pointed to the other door. There did not appear to be anything beyond it but another steeply rising vineyard: no station sign, no platform. But sure enough, the train had stopped for us. Only for us. We opened the door sheepishly. There was a kind of platform down there - a very long way down. We launched ourselves like sky-divers and the train pulled away ponderously towards the next station of Pinhão, where most of the tourists would disembark.
Not only was there a platform, but there was also a small hut serving as a station building. Not a soul was in sight. We set off up the road in the now intense afternoon heat, towards the Quinta da Marka, where we were to spend the night. The road became steeper and dustier and my back-pack grew heavier. The thought of a swim in the Quinta's pool became a fixation.
We eventually reached the Quinta da Marka after what seemed like miles (it was, in fact, only about half a kilometre). A charming young lady started telling us all about the building, the area, the walking, the river, the wine, our room...I could only nod, turn my head towards the blue pool, fidget and whimper like a labrador. Finally off my lead and free of my back-pack, I could throw myself in. It was cold, but the sun was hot and the view down the Douro as breathtaking as the temperature of the water.
Our Douro Valley walk began in earnest the next morning. We had estimated our route to Vilarinhão de São Romão at around 17km. However, despite being a walkers’ paradise, the Douro Valley is not well endowed with good walking maps and has very few waymarked routes. So, our route began on the road, as our online research had shown that the cross-country route was not easy to find. We had invested in a GPS device, but having received it only the day before we left for Portugal, we had not had a chance to set it up. All attempts to download the online routes failed.
The winding road was steep and almost free of traffic and the sun was increasingly hot. The river kept appearing in the distance, further and further down with each turn of the climbing road. The Quinta Nova appeared, then disappeared, then appeared again, apparently no further away. After what seemed like hours of slogging up hot tarmac, the Quinta Nova appeared again, still no further away.
The road eventually led to the village of Covas do Douro, a crumbling and uncannily quiet collection of houses, one café (closed) and a small, white church (also closed). The views down the valley were stunning, but there seemed to be no inhabitants to admire them.
Eventually we spotted a pair of elderly men in caps and asked for the Rua da Igreja. My pronunciation was corrected and a finger pointed in what appeared to be the wrong direction (the “igreja”, “church” seemed to be to our left, while the finger pointed right). Eventually, however, we found a cobbled street, which became a sandy track leading relentlessly upwards.
It was a long and very hot trudge, but worth it for the astounding, fragrant masses of wild flowers – lavender, rock rose, gorse and some yellow paper-like flowers that looked as though they would last forever.
After about a kilometre of climbing, we came to a stone cross, the Cruz de São Domingo. The next landmark on our route (this part printed from the internet) was the Capela de São Domingo. We couldn’t see it, but knew was on top of the hill to our left. There was a track up that hill – almost vertically up it, strewn with large, slippy-looking rocks and glowing white in the intense heat.
There was another track marked on our map, which appeared to skirt around the side of the mountain, missing the Capela. Did we really want to see Saint Dominic’s chapel that much? We took the easy route, which led through clumps of heather and gorse worthy of the Scottish Highlands, with far-reaching views to our right across valley after valley of vineyards.
All was going well. The track was easy to find, our destination at Vilarinho de São Romão gradually drawing closer. Then we came to a wall of earth several metres high. Everything pointed to the track continuing down the hill, just where the obstruction was. We looked around for clues. Any boot prints? Dropped tissues? But this was not the Scottish Highlands and there was no sign at all of any other walkers ever passing this way. Eventually, we shinned up and over the pile of earth and found a track of thick dust, churned up by some kind of large machinery. We followed it until instinct and compass suggested that we were heading away from Vilarinho. We retraced our steps. More searching for clues. Eventually, we explored beyond another huge pile of dusty soil and found the hint of a track leading off through a forest. At least it was going in the right direction.
We followed it, expecting it to disappear into an impenetrable wall of vegetation at any moment, but it didn’t. Something almost resembling a waymarked route suddenly emerged and led us down a gentle hill, past a white church with a gold, flattened onion dome, past a handsome 18th century house with only a few missing windows (so in better condition than most in rural Portugal), and into the village of Vilarinho de São Romão.
Once there, we searched in vain for our overnight stop, the Casa de Vilarinho de São Romão. Its name suggested that it must be a significant building in this otherwise modest village, but there was no finding it. We walked right, we walked left, right again, left again, along the main road, past two ladies chatting by a fountain. We ventured the name of the house, hoping that our pronunciation would approximate something that they might recognise. Portuguese is one of those languages, like English or Danish, where everything looks so simple until you try to say it, when you find that even your wildest guesses would never get near the sounds that actually come out of people's mouths. With the unassuming kindness which appears to be universal in Portugal, the ladies immediately left off their urgent conversation and one of them accompanied us all the way to the incredible medieval portico of our destination.
How on earth did we miss that? It was a gateway around 5 metres high, with a huge, dark metal doorway like a portcullis, into which was set a more human-sized door. The temporary custodian of the Casa soon appeared in it and led us through a romantically dilapidated courtyard, complete with stone fountain and goldfish pond, to an equally romantically dilapidated house, parts of it 600 years old, built of ancient oak and local stone and surrounded by its own vineyards. Lichen-covered steps led down between two stone posts, both missing their tops, to an orchard filled with cherry trees, which in May were hanging with huge, black fruit. A blackbird began to sing, adding to the silence, followed by a cuckoo calling. Both sounded slightly different from the birds we hear at home, as though they had Portuguese accents.
It was a place so embracing, so shabbily reassuring, that all the guests who arrive there probably feel, as I did, that they have been there before, at a time just beyond memory. Even the suddenly overcast sky and a sharp shower of rain, accompanied by a surprisingly cold wind, were unable to break the spell of the Casa de Vilarinho de São Romão.
Our next day’s walk was blissfully backpack-free, as we were staying another night at the Casa. We started from the middle of the village, on a reassuringly clear track through the vineyards. It led to a slope and a stunning, deep valley, with terraced vineyards on both sides and the village of Paradelinho just visible on top of the next line of hills. The track led along the side of the valley, above rows of vines and through overhanging trees; conifers and the occasional cork oak. It was the perfect walk, in bright sunshine and deep shade, with only the sounds of nectar-seeking insects, another nearby cuckoo and the distant murmur of a stream far down in the valley bottom.
We came to a tiny, stone-built house, almost derelict. A clear track led past it to the right. Another led down the valley to the left. We had no proper map, but we knew we wanted to go towards Paradelinho, which would involve crossing the valley, so we set off down through the vines. The track zig-zagged, growing steeper and rockier. I heard myself mutter, “I hope this is right, because I don’t fancy walking back up to the top in this heat.” Shortly afterwards, the “track” disappeared into a tangle of vines. We trudged back up the way we had come, very glad not to be weighed down by our backpacks as well as by the intense sun.
We tried the other track, to the right. It tempted us on round the valley, then swung determinedly round and uphill. That was not the way we wanted to go. We retraced our steps again. It had to be one or the other. There was a hint of another path going roughly in the direction we wanted to take, so we tried that. We were soon congratulating ourselves on having finally found the way. The track ended abruptly at a steep incline, nothing but terraces of vines ahead.
All other options exhausted, we worked our way to the side of the vineyard and set off down the irrigation channels, clinging on to the occasional tree and resorting to backside-shuffles when it became too steep to walk upright. Eventually, we reached the bottom of the valley, where there was a tiny bridge over a stream, a single white arum lily blooming in stately isolation next to it.
We scrambled up the other side of the vineyard and found ourselves at last on the local road. This said that it led to the next village of Celerios, so we stayed with it, climbing higher and higher round bend after bend.
Celerios seemed as deserted as Cavos do Douro had the before. The streets were thick with sandy dust, the occasional mini sand-storm picking itself up and trotting off down the middle of the road, as though it had urgent business to attend to.
We tried very hard not to think about cold drinks. Just imagine a bottle of Sagres beer, icy to the touch, fizzing on the tongue. We rounded a corner, pursued by a dust-devil…and there it was: an open café. We sank into the plastic chairs under a parasol, lost in cold beer bliss.
A woman came down some steps from the upper storey, wearing long trousers and a puffer jacket. Well, there was a bit of a wind. We had been told the day before that the weather in the last few days was considered “freezing cold” by the Portuguese. They should come and try Suffolk in January.
The coat-clad lady beckoned through the café door and the owner appeared, a bunch of keys in his hand. “I go now”, he managed in English. “Lunchtime”.
We clutched our half-consumed beers and looked forlorn. “Oh, you stay!”, he added, beaming. “Just leave everything. I come back in one hour.” With that, the couple climbed into a car, the lady still wearing her coat, and disappeared down the road in a cloud of dust.
The rest of the beers savoured, we continued on our way. The GPS had been persuaded into life and told us that there was an unpaved road going in our direction, towards the tourist village of Provosende. An unlikely dusty track between high walls covered in fig trees led us to the main road, which we decided to stay on for the remaining few kilometres.
Provosende was at the top of another long, uphill slog. It was now afternoon and the heat grew and grew. Eventually we came to the first houses, complete with barking dogs, then a “miradouro”, inviting photos to be taken of the wide vista stretching for tens of miles towards hills in all directions.
The next landmark along the road to the village turned out to be a brand-new, shiny, apparently unused and totally incongruous bus station. An enormous sign proudly announced the even more enormous sum which the EU had spent on building it. It must have seemed like a good idea to someone, somewhere. Perhaps Provosende has greatly benefitted from its impressive infrastructure – if it has any buses, that is, or anywhere for them to run to.
It is a pretty village, with bougainvillea growing on picturesque stone walls, a white church like a wedding cake and a number of cafes, all busy with tourists from the ubiquitous holiday properties. Just outside the centre was the usual collection of derelict, once beautiful seigneurial houses, with carved stone finials, window-frames like lace, caved-in roofs, tumbled joists and rooms now open to the sky and filled with their own miniature jungles.
These sad relicts seem to be everywhere in rural Portugal. Someone must own them, but nobody seems to care, or have the heart or money to restore them. Gradually they might fill with wealthy residents from northern Europe and the US, fleeing cold weather and political uncertainty (a number of visitors we met seemed to be exploring Portugal as a bolt-hole, just in case). These new owners might save some of these magnificent buildings from oblivion one day. I hope so, but in the meantime they add an unexpected twist to walking in the Douro Valley.
We set off past one particularly beautiful and long-abandoned manor house, down what we thought should be an off-road route back towards Vilarinho. The GPS and Google Maps insisted that we were going in the wrong direction. We walked back into the village and tried again. And again, in all available directions.
Finally, we found an unpaved road leading in what seemed like the right direction, which we followed until it forked. Now which way? The only available map suggested left, up the steepest, rockiest track yet. Wishful thinking and an ambiguous arrow on the GPS led us to the right, on the flat alternative. Google seemed to agree, until it suddenly swung away from our track, denied all knowledge of the area and placed us in the middle of a blank, trackless wasteland.
Well, at least we knew where the road was. We followed what was left of the track down through the vineyards and back to the road to Vilarinho; long, winding, hot, dusty, but leading surely to our lovely Casa for one more night in its stone-and-oak splendour, among its cherry-laden trees and its embracing vineyards.
Our next night’s stay was some 17km away in the small town of Alejo, either a long slog on roads, or an uncertain cross-country venture with none-too-reliable online maps. We had discovered that two of our fellow guests at the Casa were heading for the same hotel in Alejo for the next night. They were Susan and Karl, from Vermont, on a self-guided walking tour. They had been given all the right maps and detailed instructions. Their tour company had even provided a phone app, on which a disembodied voice would tell them if they had missed a turning or strayed off the approved route. They invited us to join them for the day’s trek and we gladly accepted.
It was much more relaxing, walking without having to worry about navigation along 17km of unmarked tracks. We enjoyed our first 15 minutes, strolling back through the vineyards around Vilarinho, on the same path we had taken the day before. The scenery was stunning, the morning cool, sunny and splendid.
But surely we were supposed to be going towards Sabrosa, just visible on a nearby hill? We discovered that the disembodied voice had inadvertently been turned off, and once back on again told us indignantly that we should go back to where we had started. So we and our backpacks now had 17km to cover, again.
It was no hardship, however. The scenery in the right direction was just as beautiful, wave after hilly wave of vineyards, interspersed with forests. We came eventually to the side of a steep valley, covered in vines, where the disembodied voice insisted that we go straight over the edge of the path and down the escarpment. We looked around, tried various sideways options, but our ethereal guide was not to be appeased. Eventually, Karl peered behind some olive trees and spotted what looked like a track, leading down over rocks. He volunteered to venture down for a quick look at what lay ahead. It was clearly the right way and soon turned into a proper path. We would almost certainly not have found it without our friends – all three of them.
The path followed the vineyards round a valley, where we had to avoid a cloud of insecticide being sprayed from a tiny tractor working between the rows of vines. Its driver, wrapped in hat, goggles, face-mask and various voluminous rags against the raging dust and poison fog, could neither see nor hear us coming along behind him. As soon as he realised we were there, he kindly waited for us to pass well beyond spray-blowing range before continuing with his work.
We passed the Quinta dos Corvos, with its mural of eponymous crows, and wound our way down through its rows of vines to an ancient stone bridge over the Pinhao river. We walked a short way along the road before our disembodied guide told us to turn off to the left, through what looked like the gateway to a manor house. Perhaps one had been there once, but now there was nothing but a welcomingly shady forest of fragrant pine trees, with the occasional oak and wild cherry. The shade became even more welcome as the slope grew steeper and steeper.
We emerged from the forest on to a dusty track through yet another vineyard and up yet another steep hill. The sun was beating down now and we stopped at nearly every one of the zig-zag turns to rehydrate ourselves and to cluster into what little shade was offered by the occasional olive tree.
At the top of the hill, some houses began to appear and we skirted the village of Cheiros. It didn’t look like the kind of place where refreshments would be available, so we continued along the side of a valley, with a forest on one side, where we stopped for a lunchtime rest on some convenient rocks.
The path led eventually to a track along an old, stone wall, heading towards the large village of Favaios. There seemed to be the remains of an abandoned garden behind the wall. The occasional climbing rose tumbled over into the outside world and tall, specimen conifers appeared here and there.
At the end of the wall was a huge, intricately carved gateway, the entrance to the enchanting Quinta de São Jorge. Or, at least, to what had once been the majestic Quinta. The house was as beautiful as it was derelict.
Saplings leaned out of the broken window frames and huge, oak joists were tumbled among a jumble of wild climbing stems and leaves. I looked the Quinta up later and found that it is still privately owned and is listed as a Portuguese national monument. Neither the owners nor the state seem to care about its loss. There’s another doer-upper for a disgruntled foreigner with deep pockets.
Favaios turned out to have a quaint market square and a café, complete with an unoccupied, shady table and delectably cold beers. The beers were accompanied by a bowl of beans, marinated in brine and lemon juice, tender yet nutty and delicious as a snack. We fell on them, not least because they were about the first vegetables that anyone had offered us since we had been in Portugal.
By now we had become aware that Portuguese food, at least in restaurants, consists of pork and bacalhão (salt cod). The pork and salt cod take various forms, and can be very tasty, but there is generally little else on offer and if you're vegetarian, you're out of luck. If you try really hard, you might come across sardines, but despite being a national dish, with whole shops in the cities dedicated to their tinned forms, they are far from being available everywhere, even in the coastal towns. When we did find them, they were never the indescribably delectable, super-fresh, wood-smoke-griddled morsels of deliciousness that they are in Spain. Also absent are the wonderful vegetable hot-pots, filled with peppers, tomatoes and beans, that appear on Spanish menus everywhere. Perhaps some wonderful dishes were lost in translation (on one menu, I spotted the less-than-tempting "coriander weakling with braised croaker"). Sorry, Portugal – you are lovely, but your cuisine doesn’t come close to that of your neighbour to the east.
We spent a very happy half hour with our beers and snacks. These turned out to be not fava beans, as I had thought, but lupin beans. Apparently, however, they come from a particular kind of lupin, so we won’t be trying the ones that grow in our garden.
As we sipped and savoured, we listened to the sonorous, fluid shushing sounds of the rural Portuguese being spoken by a group of elderly men putting the world to rights at the next table, like groups of elderly men in cafes everywhere in Europe. Soon, they were joined by an even older woman, wearing a hat and scarf in the intense heat. She was offered a plastic chair and poised herself on it, like a queen ascending a throne. She began to hold forth in a loud and ancient voice. The men fell silent and listened, reverently. She was still holding court, making her regal, sibilant declarations on the state of the world, and the men were still nodding agreement in hushed respect, when we eventually dragged ourselves away from our shady spot to tackle the remaining few kilometres to Alijo.
We set off through the market square, past the Museum of Bread (well, it made a change from port), past the church and down another Rua da Igreja, on to a waymarked trail towards Alijo. This is a larger town, with a proper hotel, the Pousada do Barão Forrester, named after an English baron who came to Portugal in the 19th century in search of…well, port. Legend has it that he met a sad, watery end in the Douro. The hotel is a three storey building that resembles neither a hotel, nor a Quinta, nor a house of any description, nor anything else come to that. It does, however, have a swimming pool, into which we flung ourselves gratefully, before the sun disappeared behind a huge storm cloud, lightning flashed, the rain arrived…and my walking boots, left on the balcony, became goldfish bowls within seconds. Another soggy end in the Douro Valley, but at least this one was at the end of a superb day’s walking.
We were on our own again for our next walk, a 16km cross-country trek back to the Douro River at Pinhão. We set off after an enormous breakfast, with all navigation options running: GPS, printed maps, Google maps. The first waypoint was Favaios again, which was easy to find after our previous day’s walk. After that, it became more difficult. We knew that we had to head south, so we more or less followed the sun, down the convenient tracks through the local vineyards.
The landscape was flatter around Alijo itself, but as we continued along the hillside, following the Pinhão River valley, the slopes became steeper, the valley deeper and its high, vineyard-covered sides more dramatic. The GPS did its best to find some off-road tracks and gave us an option through a particularly remote and dusty vineyard. We came to a Quinta, where a bus load of schoolchildren was arriving in noisy excitement, apparently for a tour of the winery, probably complete with tasting. Imagine that in the UK.
It was hot. The kilometres ahead of us began to appear endless. Suddenly, from nowhere, a tiny car came edging towards us, sending up a cloud of dust. When it drew level with us, the occupants, two ladies of indeterminate age, wound down the window, thrust a huge bouquet of cherry branches into our arms, waved and wobbled off dustily down the track in their ancient car.
Clusters of huge, black cherries, bursting with juice, hung from every stem of our enormous bouquet. Nearby was a cork oak, apparently long used as a picnic spot, as it was surrounded by a magic circle of tree stump seats. We sat in its shade and ate our way steadily through our shiny, black treasures. Another example of the random kindness so typical of the Portuguese.
The track led us on through the endless vineyards. We came across the stand of cherry trees where our benefactors must have picked our bounty. The trees had probably been owned by their family for generations.
Further on, there was another encounter, this time with a fearsome-looking beast. It was about 5cm long, with an elongated, shiny black body, striped with brilliant scarlet. It looked up and inspected me as I inspected it, then it suddenly tried to hide in my shade. I skipped out of its way, fascinated and intimidated in equal measures. I later looked it up and found that it was a red-striped oil beetle.
We came eventually, in the growing heat, to a village called Casal de Loivos. White-painted and perched on the top of a very high hill, it revealed astonishing views down towards the Douro River. Tourists suddenly thronged, sweating up the steep streets to the “mirodouro”, with its fine vista of the twin valleys. Pinhão, our destination, was just visible down in the distance, at the confluence of the Pinhão and the Douro rivers. It looked a very, very long way down. Layer after layer of mountains stretched away into the far distance, all carrying their load of horizontal, or sometimes vertical, stripes of endless vineyards.
There was a waymarked path down to Pinhão, but the waymarks kept running out, whichever way we tried. Eventually, we just set off in the general direction of “down”, on an extremely dusty track. It was a very hot and winding route, steep and rocky in places, ankle deep in sand in others. By the time we got to the rows of famous port warehouses at the bottom, we were extremely thankful that we had not been walking in the opposite direction. Any hapless hiker with a heavy backpack trying to follow our route up towards Casal de Loivos that day would probably arrive dehydrated, covered from head to toe in dust and crawling on hands and knees up the sandy escarpment, like Lawrence of Arabia after a particularly bad day in the desert.
Pinhão was unlike the rest of our Douro Valley adventure. It was full to bursting with tourists, tumbling off boats and out of buses and straight into the nearest, expensive restaurant overlooking the river. We set off in search of the station, so that we would know exactly where to go on our early start the next morning, when we were due to catch the train back to Porto and then on to Lisbon. We checked the timetable and which platform the train would leave from. That, we found, was a good move, as getting to the right platform involved marching straight across the railway tracks. Arriving late would involve making that daunting crossing in the path of an oncoming train. We made a note to set our alarm extra early.
After finding our overnight accommodation, we chose a restaurant at the top of the hill – and away from the tourists - for our final Douro Valley meal. It was in a slightly weird location, on the upper floor of a fire station, with no obvious way in. A tour of the carpark eventually revealed a door, leading on to a staircase and into the fire station itself. At the top of the staircase was a narrow balcony filled with tables, with stunning views of the steep vineyards and the meeting point of the rivers Douro and Pin hOur next night’s stay was some 17km away in the small town of Alejo, either a long slog on roads, or an uncertain cross-country venture with none-too-reliable online maps. We had discovered that two of our fellow guests at the Casa were heading for the same hotel in Alejo for the next night. They were Susan and Karl, from Vermont, on a self-guided walking tour. They had all the right maps and detailed instructions. They even had a phone app on which a disembodied voice would tell them if they had missed a turning or strayed off the approved route. They invited us to join them for the day’s trek and we gladly accepted.
It was much more relaxing, walking without having to worry about navigation along 17km of unmarked tracks. We enjoyed our first 15 minutes, strolling back through the vineyards around Vilarinho, on the same track we had taken the day before. The scenery was stunning, the morning cool, sunny and splendid.
But surely we were supposed to be going towards S?? We discovered that the disembodied voice had inadvertently been turned off, and once back on again told us indignantly that we should go back to where we had started. So we now had 17km to cover, again.
It was no hardship, however. The scenery in the right direction was just as beautiful, wave after hilly wave of vineyards, interspersed with forests. We came eventually to the side of a steep valley, covered in vines, where the disembodied voice insisted that we go straight over the edge of the path and down the escarpment. We looked around, tried various sideways options, but our ethereal guide was not to be appeased. Eventually, Karl peered behind some olive trees and spotted what looked like a track, leading down over rocks. He volunteered to venture down for a quick look at what lay ahead. It was clearly the right way and soon turned into a proper path. We would almost certainly not have found it without our friends – all three of them.
The path followed the vineyards round a valley, where we had to avoid a cloud of insecticide being sprayed from a tiny tractor working between the rows of vines. Its driver, wrapped in hat, goggles, face-mask and various voluminous rags against the raging dust, could neither see nor hear us coming along behind him. As soon as he realised we were there, he kindly waited for us to pass well beyond spray-blowing range before continuing with his work.
We passed the Quinta dos Corvos, with its mural of eponimous crows, and wound our way down through the vines to an ancient stone bridge over the Pinhao river. We walked a short way along the road before our disembodied guide told us to turn off to the left, through what looked like the gateway to a manor house. Perhaps one had been there once, but now there was nothing but a welcomingly shady forest of fragrant pine trees, with the occasional oak and wild cherry. The shade became even more welcome as the slope grew steeper and steeper.
We emerged from the forest on to a dusty track through yet another vineyard and up yet another steep hill. The sun was beating down now and we stopped at nearly every one of the zig-zag turns to rehydrate ourselves and to cluster into what little shade was offered by the occasional olive tree.
At the top of the hill, some houses began to appear and we skirted the village of Cheiros. It didn’t look like the kind of place where refreshments would be available, so we continued along the side of a valley, with a forest on one side, where we stopped for a lunchtime rest on some convenient rocks.
The path led eventually to a track along an old, stone wall, heading towards the large village of Favaios. There seemed to be the remains of an abandoned garden behind the wall. The occasional climbing rose tumbled over into the outside world and tall, specimen conifers appeared here and there. At the end of the wall was an enormous, intricately carved gateway, the entrance to the enchanting Quinta de São Jorge. The house was as beautiful as it was derelict. Saplings leaned out of every broken window frame and huge, oak joists were tumbled among a jumble of wild climbing stems and leaves. I looked the Quinta up later and found that it is still privately owned and is listed as a Portuguese national monument. Neither the owners nor the state seem to care about its loss. There’s another doer-upper for a disgruntled foreigner with deep pockets.
Favaios turned out to have a quaint market square and a café, complete with an unoccupied, shady table and delectably cold beers. The beers were accompanied by a bowl of beans, marinated in brine and lemon juice, tender yet nutty and delicious as a snack. We fell on them, not least because they were about the first vegetables that anyone had offered us since we had been in Portugal. By now we had become aware that Portuguese food, at least in restaurants, consists of pork and bacalhão (salt cod). The pork and salt cod take various forms, but there is very little else on offer. If you’re really lucky, you might come across sardines, but despite apparently being a national dish, they are far from being available everywhere and when we did find them, they were never the indescribably delectable, super-fresh, wood-smoke-griddled morsels of deliciousness that they are in Spain. Sorry Portugal – you are lovely, but your cuisine doesn’t come close to your neighbour’s to the east.
We spent a very happy half hour with our beers and snacks. These turned out to be not fava beans, as I had thought, but lupin beans. Apparently, however, they come from a particular kind of lupin, so we won’t be trying the ones that grow in our garden. We listened to the lovely, fluid shushing sounds of the rural Portuguese being spoken by a group of elderly men putting the world to rights at the next table, like groups of elderly men in cafes everywhere in Europe. They were joined by an even older woman, wearing a hat and scarf in the intense heat. She began to speak and the men fell silent and listened, reverently. She was still holding court, stating her confident, sibilant declarations on the state of the world, and the men were still nodding agreement, when we eventually dragged ourselves away from our shady spot to tackle the remaining few kilometres to Alijo.
We set off through the market square, past the Museum of Bread (well, it made a change from port), past the church and down another Rua da Igreja, on to a waymarked trail towards Alijo. This is a larger town, with a proper hotel, the Pousada do Barão Forester, named after an English baron who came to Portugal in the 18th century in search of…well, port. Legend has it that he met a sad, watery end in the Douro. The hotel is a 3 storey building that doesn’t resemble a hotel, or a Quinta, or a house of any description, or anything else come to that. It does, however, have a swimming pool, into which we flung ourselves gratefully, before the sun disappeared behind a huge storm cloud, lightning flashed, the rain arrived…and my walking boots, left on the balcony, became goldfish bowls within seconds. Another soggy end, but a superb day’s walking.
We were on our own again for our next walk, a 16km cross-country trek back to the Douro River at Pinhão. We set off after an enormous breakfast, with all navigation options running: GPS, printed maps, Google maps. The first waypoint was Favaios again, which was easy to find after our previous day’s walk. After that, it became more difficult. We knew that we had to head south, so we more or less followed the sun, down the convenient tracks through the local vineyards.
The landscape was flatter around Alijo itself, but as we continued along the hillside, following the Pinhão River valley, the slopes became steeper, the valley deeper and its high, vineyard-covered sides more dramatic. The GPS did its best to find some off-road tracks and gave us an option through a particularly remote and dusty vineyard. We came to a Quinta, where a bus load of schoolchildren was arriving in noisy excitement, apparently for a tour of the winery, probably complete with tasting. Imagine that in the UK.
It was hot. The kilometres ahead of us began to appear endless. Suddenly, from nowhere, a tiny car came edging towards us, sending up a cloud of dust. When it drew level with us, the occupants, two ladies of indeterminate age, wound down the window, thrust a huge bouquet of cherry branches into our arms, waved and wobbled off dustily down the track in their ancient car. Clusters of huge, black cherries, bursting with juice, hung from every stem of our enormous bouquet. Nearby was a cork oak, apparently long used as a picnic spot, as it was surrounded by a magic circle of tree stump seats. We sat in its shade and ate our way steadily through our shiny, black treasures. Another example of the random kindness so typical of the Portuguese.
The track led us on through the endless vineyards. We came across the stand of cherry trees where our benefactors must have picked our bounty. The trees had probably been owned by their family for generations.
Further on, there was another encounter, this time with a fearsome-looking beast. It was about 5cm long, with an elongated, shiny black body, striped with brilliant scarlet. It looked up and inspected me as I inspected it, then it suddenly tried to hide in my shade. I skipped out of its way, fascinated and intimidated in equal measures. I later looked it up and found that it was a red-striped oil beetle.
We came eventually, in the growing heat, to a village called Coscal de Loivos, white-painted and perched on the top of a very high hill, it revealed astonishing views down towards the Douro River. Tourists suddenly thronged, sweating up the steep streets to the “mirodouro”, with its fine vista of the twin valleys. Pinhão, our destination, was just visible down in the distance, at the confluence of the Pinhão and the Douro rivers. It looked a very, very long way down. Layer after layer of mountains stretched away into the far distance, all carrying their load of horizontal, or sometimes vertical, stripes of endless vineyards.
There was a waymarked path down to Pinhão, but the waymarks kept running out, whichever way we tried. Eventually, we just set off in the general direction of “down”, on an extremely dusty track. It was a very hot and winding route, steep and rocky in places, ankle deep in sand in others. By the time we got to the bottom, we thanked our lucky stars that we had not been walking in the opposite direction. Any hapless walker with a heavy backpack trying to follow our route up towards Coscal de Loivos that day would probably arrive dehydrated, covered from head to toe in dust and crawling on hands and knees up the sandy escarpment, like Lawrence of Arabia after a particularly bad day in the desert.
Pinhão was unlike the rest of our Douro Valley adventure. It was full to bursting with tourists, tumbling off boats and out of buses and straight into the nearest, expensive restaurant overlooking the river. We set off in search of the station, so that we would know exactly where to go on our early start the next morning, when we were due to catch the train back to Porto and then on to Lisbon. We checked the timetable and the platform, which we had to access by walking straight across the railway track. Something else you are unlikely to see in the UK.
After finding our overnight accommodation, we chose a restaurant at the top of the hill – and away from the tourists - for our final Douro Valley meal. It was a slightly weird location, on the upper floor of a fire station, with no obvious way in. A tour of the carpark eventually revealed a door, leading on to a staircase and into the fire station itself. At the top of the staircase was a narrow balcony filled with tables, with stunning views of the steep vineyards and the meeting point of the rivers Douro and Pinhão.
As we sipped our chilled white wine and admired the surrounding hills where it was grown, the sky gradually darkened, the sun vanished and lightning began again to echo around the hills. It looked as though the Douro Valley had another soggy end in mind for us, but this time we were lucky – the rain waited for us to finish our meal. It was, of course, salt-cod.
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