What’s this? What do I see here, moving along the path in front of me? Looks like a miniature train, a metre-long string of compartments of about an inch and a half each in length – except less rigid than a train in the way the segments undulate moving forward, and they’re beautifully furry. I’ve never seen anything like it . . .
It turns out I happened to witness one of the short-lived miracles of nature by being in the right place, in a pine forest in the Lousa area of central Portugal at the right time, a mid-February afternoon. Some quick research explained that this was a train of woolly ‘processionary caterpillars’ crossing the trail: head-to-tail, purposefully trekking away from their birthing tree-house into the big wide world, in search of a new identity. Soon they’d be reinventing themselves as moths.
These caterpillars have long soft white hairs sticking out of their brown and yellow striped bodies. During their trek on the ground they’re fully exposed, so Nature protects them with a poisonous chemical in those lovely hairs that causes painful open sores on the skin of a keen predator. These beasties are soft and cute and you want to touch them, but I’m glad I didn’t. I kept their train on track.
I had already noticed that many young pine trees in the forests of the Serra da Lousa show big, white, tightly woven bags stuck to their outer branches and tops. Now I could put it all together: these are the cradles of the processionary caterpillar-larvae who feed on the young pine shoots before they walk away. This may kill the trees: eventually they pay with their lives for repeatedly hosting these insects.




The nest of the ‘Thaumetopoea Pityocampa’ moth larvae in a pinetree, and the camouflaged procession of its caterpillars on the ground.
Portugal was unknown to me so I was curious about this country. These days, it’s a favorite tourist destination, partly because it’s still relatively affordable compared to other places in Europe, and partly because of the comfortable climate and the fact that the Portuguese are warm, friendly people, unjaded as of yet. They speak good English, too.
Coming from Spain’s Andalusia, I was not too far from the southern Portuguese Algarve region where a special event awaited me: four friends from Vancouver happened to rent an apartment in Faro and invited me to join. A very welcome interlude to break the silence of my lenghty solo-existence, to finally be able to converse and wine and dine in good company.
On the way, I spent a couple of days in Sevilla which has to be one of the most beautiful cities on earth. Historically, architecturally and culturally, this place vibrates. You could say it ‘rocks,’ were it not that the dominant musical form here is flamenco, with a Sevillan emphasis on the dance. Various Andalusian cities compete about being the ‘centre of this’ or the most ‘authentic of that:’ Jerez de la Frontera claims to be the centre of the singing element of the form, while others say they spring the best guitarists. Truth is that flamenco is an amalgam of various musical and social influences, ancient roots in India and the ‘Moorish’ Islamic era of Andalusia being prominent ones. The art took hundreds of years to develop into what it is now, gelling into a prominent ‘gypsy’ art form as late as the 19th Century, an embodiment of these people’s low, oppressed socio-economic status in Spain.
Because of all this, there are loads of tourists in Sevilla of course, but more importantly, its own citizens clearly take pride and pleasure in their city. Someone told me that even the locals still regularly get lost in the warren of narrow medieval alleyways of Sevilla, in what used to be the medina in Moorish Al-Andalus. One of the delightful Iberian customs for families, friends and lovers is to go for an urban stroll towards the end of the afternoon to enjoy its streets and plazas ‘in community.’ More often than not, they settle in at one of the numerous outdoor cafés for drinks and conversation. It’s my favorite time of day in this country, despite traveling alone. I simply seat myself in the midst of these chatty, laughing, multi-generational groups, enjoying their presence vicariously. I like seeing happy people who enjoy each other’s company in public and in the streets, but most importantly, still having conversations, not staring into their phones all the time.
In North America, people tend to be afraid of big cities and particularly of the downtowns which they avoid at night, those draughty, deserted office-tower places devoid of attractive, family-friendly outward-looking drinking establishments. Here in southern Europe, people come from the residential suburbs to enjoy their historical city centres, to be seen, shop and socialize.


Not a day in Portugal without a ‘cortado’ and a ‘gado de nata.’ And no, this is not a pastry shop; it’s a butcher’s display in the public market.
You’d conclude from looking around that all Spanish and Portuguese people ever do is eat and drink, so where and when do they work? It must be early in the morning before the restaurants fill up again for the big mid-day meal. Some streets consist of a continuous line-up of cafés and restaurants – and yet, you never see drunkenness because of the strong social stigma attached to it. Drinking is something you do every day as a matter of course, but only socially, never alone to merely ‘get loaded.’ The ‘ramblas’ is a lively habit, and I enjoyed it in Lisbon and in Porto, too. Both cities are wonderfully interesting and walkable, despite the steep embankments their streetscapes are built on.


Underneath the bridges: (L) the Port of Lisbon; (R) the famous rail and pedestrian bridge across the Douro River connecting Porto and Villa Nova de Gaia.

Opposite the Douro River skirting Porto, in the Villa Nova de Gaia, the extensive industrial landscape of port wine production still exists and is alive as ever with its numerous tasting opportunities and restaurants. Graham’s, Taylor’s, Sandeman, Cockburn’s: almost all port wines have British names, because in the 17th Century, England was allied with Portugal against the French, and British merchants invented ‘port’ wine by adding some brandy to the hefty local Douro grapejuice. The longer the wine is aged in wooden casks, the more subtle the flavour; the price inevitably reflects this. I treated myself to a Colheita 2007 by Barros, meaning a single-harvest tawny port aged in small oak barrels for 17 years to 20% alcohol per volume. I’m still enjoying this treasure five months later in the Netherlands, one sip at a time.


Typical Portuguese grapevine pruning technique: one branch, 90 degrees in one direction only.

There’s another thing a visitor owes herself to seek out while in Porto, Lisbon or Coimbra: Fado – Portugal’s famous musical genre. It’s poetry in song, accompanied by one or more Portuguese guitars. A form of blues (‘fate’), it speaks of matters of the heart (‘corazon’) and a universal sadness or longing (‘tristeza; saudade”), more than social oppression. Much like flamenco, the form matured in the 19th Century, but was generated amongst the urban working classes and sailors expressing their sorrows, rather than a specifically oppressed group like the ‘outsider’ gitanos of Spain. Numerous small performance spaces and restaurants feature fado musicians; it’s not hard to find. To my ears, fado’s kind of sorrow tends to sound a bit too whiney and is often set to familiar waltz-like rhythms. I prefer flamenco which is musically more interesting and vigorous: their singers ‘fight back,’ they scream their resistance and literally spit out their agonies while virtuoso guitarists play and improvise in exceedingly complicated percussive rhythms.
Not far to the east of Porto in the Arouca area is a well-known, well designed hiking trail between Areinho and Espiunca, high along the edges of the Paiva River. There are many wooden staircases, constructed to negotiate the straight cliffs with their dramatic views and the highlight, halfway, is a dizzyingly high and long suspension bridge over the river. It makes for a welcome dayhike in a natural area, after a week in the crowded urban scene of Porto.



The suspension bridge over the Rio Paiva at Canelas.
The southern town of Faro in the Algarve preserved its small old walled city with its sizeable cathedral and has a nice walkway along the oceanfront. But all too soon you’re back in the surrounding neighbourhoods with their willy-nilly building practice of styles, materials, ages, heights and widths. Here a piece of an old wall, there a non-descript four-story modern facade, and next to it an abandoned, shuttered little building with a residential highrise behind it. In Portugal’s new suburbs, in smaller towns and even in the countryside, this first impression of an architectural mish-mesh and poor urban design – my particular bias – remained throughout. The architect’s daughter that I am, careless and unimaginative architecture irks me. To me, it proved difficult to find ‘pride of place’ in Portugal beyond the lovely old cities: spots of sustained, respected and carefully preserved beauty – albeit with suitable modifications to enable modern life – of the kind you find in France, for instance. Portugal looks like a mess, generally. The question is whether that’s a factor of having been one of the poorest countries in Europe for far too long under Oliveira Salazar’s dictatorship (1932 – 1968), combined with decades-long mismanagement by numerous subsequent short-lived governments.


Some of the extreme building contrasts in Faro (L) and Olhao, in the Algarve.


Creative adaptive uses of abandoned churches and chapels, both by storks and by banks.
People are doing much better these days, and those with money will build the most architecturally atrocious, far too large houses in impossible places to show it, much like successful immigrants in the larger-Vancouver area are wont to do. In Portugal, these ‘monster homes’ often sit next to the family’s now ruined old property that cannot be demolished by law. Unlike what’s happening in France and Spain, not many old places are scooped up by expatriates, to be restored and made livable again with foreign money. Not yet. Foreigners have discovered Portugal by now and they’re coming, but some of these houses are simply too far gone, which makes for a confusing, mixed landscape of decay and brand-newness devoid of a well-developed esthetic that suits the landscape. Meanwhile, the influx of tourists prompted many Portuguese homeowners to upgrade their historical apartments in downtown areas and rent them out. It’s an ever more urgent issue in popular destinations everywhere: short-term rental to tourists rather than long-term occupancy by local citizens, with the resulting housing shortage. However, the current mayor of Porto, Rui Moreira, sees AirB&B as an incentive for owners to renovate their apartments, not in the already tourist-saturated downtown apartments where new rentals are now banned, but particularly in the outlying neighbourhoods where many buildings are nearly ruined. This way, he hopes to regenerate the built environment of the wider city, too.
In Lisbon I stayed in the suburb of Olivais in just such a renovated property, well away from the noisy, busy downtown, but accessed easily enough by metro.

Political messages and police in front of the Parliament building in Lisbon.
Driving the byways north from Faro toward Lisbon and beyond, I notice another salient Portuguese trait: the entire original forest has been clear cut and subsequently planted with eucalyptus, an Australian industrial tree that grows fast but absorbs water like a sponge and draws all useful nutrients out of the soil. It’s also a terribly invasive species.
I spent some weeks in central Portugal, both in the Serra da Lousa mountains of the Beira Baixa, and the Serra da Estrela to the north of it. The Lousa area is known for its compact, grey nature-stone villages, the ‘Aldeias do Xisto,’ and here, finally, I get to enjoy a truer landscape and a sense of what life in rural Portugal would have looked like.


Detail of ‘my’ village, Cantal, and another ‘aldeia do xisto: Talasnal.
It’s a good hiking area on traditional farmers’ trails that used to connect the various remote mountain villages when donkeys were the only mode of transport. The forests are more mixed here and yet, it’s hard to know what’s planted and what’s indigenous: extremely invasive eucalyptus, mimosa and pine still reign on the mountain slopes in addition to the various kinds of oaks including cork oaks, hazelnuts and domestic chestnuts.


Eucalyptus, pine and mimosa in the forests of the Lousa region; Detail of the old town of Lousa.
The mimosa can no longer be contained: it’s everywhere in the Lousa area. This time of year, late winter, its ample trusses of blooms cover the mountain slopes in eye-popping yellow and its delightful scent fills the air, seducing you to marvel at its beauty before you come to know that it’s one of the most aggressively invasive tree species of all.
It’s extremely hard to find a spot in Portugal with its original vegetation intact, but some of the higher regions begin to look more like the French ‘garrigue’ vegetation of lichen, gorse, heather and other leathery evergreen bushes.
Even in the preserved ’natural’ Parques, the mountains have been clear-cut or grazed bare. Apparently, both practices are still allowed and continue.

The barren winter landscape of the Serra da Estrela; slopes covered with partly burned broom.
One day, hiking on a cold, foggy slope high in the barren mountains of the Serra de Estrela, I meet a lone sheepdog, black, large and shaggy. He keeps his distance but is alert to my alien presence. Rounding the corner, a bit higher up on the trail, I suddenly face a compact herd of hundreds of sheep descending, pushing eachother along, completely blocking the route. No other way than to stand still and patiently observe this loud, bleating, undulating ocean of animals passing by. They take their time. Finally I spot the shape of a human, a vague dark figure emanating from the mist. The herder, wrapped in a dark woollen cape and tucked under a brimmed cap, stands there in high leather boots holding his long wooden stick. He’s barely acknowledging me, but he must, mainly because of this unusually anachronistic moment of the two of us loners crossing paths. For me, a ‘medieval’ sight that no film director could improve upon.
And experiencing the Serra da Estrela goes even further back in time than that: frequently I find myself walking on a Roman road, between one and two metres wide, its rough square boulders still clearly layed out for miles ahead. These Roman routes connected settlements via high mountain passes: not the easiest, but definitively the shortest way. Imprints made by heavy Roman cartwheels are still visible, etched deeper into the rocks by the rivolets of time.


A Roman road leading straight into a new subdivision, and another into the misty mountains around Folgosinho, both in the Serra da Estrela.

The often 10-foot high broom in this historically degraded landscape covers most middle-sections of the mountains which blocks the view and makes for a monotonous, tunnel-like hiking trail, but the verdant lee-sides of the slopes and riverbeds as well as the peculiarly pittoresque, huge rounded boulders strewn around in places make up for it. Tungsten was discovered inside these strange rocky slopes in the early part of the 20th Century: mines, now defunct, created vast riches almost overnight for some local entrepreneurs, for only a short while. More traditionally the area was a centre for spinning and weaving wool into cloth, and the large fincas, or country estates, attest to the wealth that was once derived from this industry. I had the pleasure of staying in one of these stately fincas, lovingly restored by a Dutch couple who spent their entire adult lives in the area, spoke fluent Portuguese and were fully active members of the local community of Melo, near Gouveia. The spacious rooms, the thick walls made of big chunks of the local stone, the huge chestnut beams supporting the ceilings, the typical Portuguese hand-painted tiles on the walls (‘azulejos’), the way the doors were hung and their beautiful hardware, the remnants of a baroque garden in front: every original detail was worth special consideration.
And this was a relatively modest property. Not far down the road from here was a ‘billionaire’s finca,’ a most extravagant, immaculately maintained example of the type, albeit of later vintage. Inbetween the two, in the centre of the village of Melo, the remnants of a much older, extensive royal palace could be found, complete with double staircase and platform leading to the large entrance arch and the family’s private chapel, the residence itself now irrevocably ruined and overgrown.

Great place for a swing, overlooking central Portugal at 1100 m.
In my opinion as a hiker and nature lover, the far north of Portugal proved to be the most consistently beautiful part of the country. Both the western part of the North, the Minho, and the far eastern part, the Tras-os-Montes area of the Parque Natural de Montesinho were lovely in their variety of mountain landscapes.
The Minho is the home of Vinho Verde, the young, slightly ‘pétillant’ white wine that’s so easy to drink on a hot summer afternoon. The small city of Ponte de Lima derives its name from the medieval pedestrian bridge across the Rio Lima, part of an even older Roman crossing that connects the two parts of the city. Hikers on the pilgrimage route to Santiago de Compostela in Northern Spain use this bridge. These modern pilgrims enter the town from the south, along the river, and walk underneath the spectacular tunnel-like canopy of a kilometre-long allée of ancient plane trees, quite an impressive experience.

Ponte de Lima’s plane tree allée in winter, on the pilgrim’s route to Santiago de Compostela.



. . . and some more mosaic sidewalk treatments in f.l.t.r. Faro, Aveiro and Porto.
It was winter when I was there, rainy and chilly, so only a very few hardy types were walking the ‘camino.’ But in my hostel, located a bit further away on the north side of the Lima River, in a part of town called Arcozelo, I met with an honest-to-God ‘real pilgrim.’
A Catholic searching for redemption, or penitence, or both, he was an intriguingly grizzled character who took a few days off walking because of the inclement weather. There’d be no views at all while climbing the nearby mountain pass now shrouded in fog and rain, and that would be a pity. The man looked like an unmade bed, wore boots that had clearly walked around the globe a few times; his face and hands were made of leather but his almost toothless grin was friendly and sociable, up to a point where the man chose to remain a mystery, keeping to himself. Waiting for the rains to end, he sat in the kitchen most of the time, obsessively playing games on his phone, his only modern possession. An Italian, 72 years old. ’When I was in my early twenties,’ he explained, ‘I was part of a crew on a fishing boat on the Mediterranean Sea. We shipwrecked in a wicked storm. Everybody drowned, I was the only survivor. I wondered why me . . looking for answers. I had to find a way to express my sorrow and my gratitude; pay my respect to God and the Guardian Angels who saved me. So I became a humble pilgrim and set out to visit, on foot, all Holy Sites in the whole wide world, for the rest of my life.’
And he did. From Rome to Lourdes, from Jerusalem to Ireland, Mexico and South America, he went to wherever the sacred destinations of importance to Catholics are. Having done the various camino routes to northwest Spain for the umptiest time, he was an expert on traveling on foot all over the world and a great source of information to the younger, more secular hikers en route to Santiago de Compostela. A fascinating encounter. Proof that some people, this side of India’s wandering sadhus, still find a completely alternative, ‘outside,’ off-grid kind of life with all their worldly belongings on their back, and live it with conviction.

Natural vegetation in the higher, wilder regions of the mountains of Tras-os-Montes.
Afterward, I crossed over to the far north-east, to the area called Tras-os-Montes. It’s possibly the most remote and wild area of Portugal, but traditionally also the poorest. Most of it consists of protected landscapes, one of them being the Parque Natural de Montesinho. I stayed on the southern edge of this park, in Vinhais.
From the main west-east road that follows the Douro River valley, numerous small and winding routes lead straight up north to connect the little farmer’s villages in the mountains. All steep but reasonably suitable patches of land in the lower regions and around the villages are cultivated or grazed; one has to go even further, to the highest parts of the mountains to be in the wilder areas. And they’re great. Literally at the end of a scenic, curvy one-lane road, almost completely isolated from the rest of the country in centuries past, there’ll be a tiny farmers’ hub of a few houses built with the available local materials: nature stone and wood, connected by cobblestones, little bridges and stairs. Edroso, França and Montesinho village itself, are beautiful, intact examples of the local vernacular architecture. Me and my hiking habit are completely happy in this visually astounding area.



Villages in the Parque de Montesinho: vernacular architecture utilizing local stones; slate roof construction technique.
The rivers and creeks that feed the Douro flow directly south down the mountains of the Tras-os-Montes, creating parallel ranges that are not always connected with bridges, or only once, in the lower regions. Lateral travel between villages can be complicated and long-distance because of the lay of the land.
Once time had come to move on and re-enter Spain, I wanted to cross the border at the most remote, highest north-east corner of Portugal and descend into Leon from there. I studied the map and found what looked like an interesting, reasonably direct, diagonal route from Vinhais across the Rio de Onor, via a bridge midway to the faraway border. After a few hours of convoluted mountain driving – which I love – I arrived at this little stone bridge over the Onor river, located in the middle of a village. It was closed! Impassable. But no other bridge exists anywhere near. One of those disappointments in life I hadn’t bargained on . . Lots of construction workers standing around, bulldozer and all kinds of equipment at hand, the river partly fenced up to allow for bridge repairs. No signs ahead, no warnings of the closure at the last road junction, no suggestions of an alternative route for through-traffic to take; obviously the locals knew of it and who else could possibly be there to tell? You could see the surprised construction crew think: ‘what’s this lone female foreign driver doing up here, thinking she’d get across?’ Friendly, helpful Portuguese men, all of them, apologetically shrugging shoulders, but they probably thought me stupid for being there at all.
So I had to backtrack more than fifty kilometres, downhill again toward the main highway, and take another little road back up to the Montesinho village area where I’d cross the border at Portelo, the somewhat more usual route that lands you in Pueblo de Sanabria in Spain. Truth is, no matter which road you’re on, the beauty of the region’s mountain landscapes with their vast panoramas offered me plenty consolation and no regrets at all.
I’d like to think the sweet people of Portugal didn’t want me to leave, and I didn’t really want to, either.
