Northern Loop
Ann and I finally said enough is enough and we need to start doing what we moved to Portugal to do. But given that we haven’t really done much (read: any) planning, and the fact that it was supposed to be somewhere between 36-38 C (97-100 F), we decided a road trip was in order. A day trip to hike around some area would have to wait another day. So join us on our cruise around northern Portugal.
Unsure about where we were going to go, I pulled out some maps and thought of a couple of “loop” drives we could take. Considering we are in the middle of a heat wave and that the farther inland one goes and south one goes the hotter it gets, we agreed doing a loop of northern Portugal was in order. The concept was to drive up through the mountainous national park, west along the Minho River (with Spain on the other side), down the coast and then back inland to Braga. We really have no feel for distances here, or the road conditions, so that loop afforded us some options for cutting the trip short if we needed.
And that’s what wound up happening. We intentionally took as many back roads as possible heading northward, and we certainly succeeded. Some of the small villages we drove through, with houses roads about one cart, I mean car, wide had people looking at us like we were aliens from another planet. Granted, GPS doesn’t always take you on commonly used roads, so maybe they aren’t used to visitors. Anyway, here’s a track of our trip - we only made it to Valença before we headed back to home.
The trip was a great reminder of just how little exploring/traveling we’ve done since we’ve been so focused on making the move. Friday night we had to move our camera gear from our travel bags to the small backpacks we brought (stuffed with other things, then stuffed into luggage bags), which meant having to first charge the batteries and then insert them into the cameras. Which meant our cameras had been without juice for awhile, so we had to configure the settings on our cameras, which meant trying to remember what all the settings (most of which are irrelevant to what we do, but have to be set anyway) actually do. Then on Saturday morning, Ann realized that we could (read: should) download maps we can use on the trip. So she did that. And, of course, we forgot to turn on the tracking, so the actual tracking (the orange track) started about a quarter of the way into the trip. I added the red track after the fact.
Even with us having to regain our sea legs, it was a nice trip and our first venture out into parts of Portugal unknown. As one might imagine, much of Portugal outside of the cities is in farm land. Smaller farms than in the US, more villages, but still farmland. And like in the US, more than once we had to stop because of a long-horn cow in the middle of the road.
And given that the eastern part of Portugal is mountainous (not Alps mountains, but mountainous nonetheless), farms are often terraced.
And as one might expect from a country whose culture predates the discovery of the Americas by many, many centuries, there seems to be historic sights in every small town. We stopped in one (no clue where) that had a really lovely church and shine on the hillside. Then again, there was this old lady there who insisted on talking to everybody there and who wasn’t discouraged by my commenting (in Portuguese) that I don’t speak Portuguese and that I didn’t understand her.
One of the things that struck me most about the Portuguese landscape is that the valleys are deeply cut. Whereas when you drive up the McKenzie River, or most rivers in the US, you tend to drive along the river. On this trip, it seems we drove well above the bottom of the valley, and rarely saw the river at all. Then again, it was easy to look across and see the towns on the other side . . . .
While in some respects it was supposed to be just a first-time-out, Saturday drive to check out Portugal, it was (as always with us), a bit of a scouting trip. True, we were a bit rusty, but take this spot for example. Take a look at the bottom right portion of the photo, near where the creek meets the river . . .
You can see a stone bridge, and a trail that leads to it. So is that a public trail? Photographing minds want to know!
As we climbed in elevation the separation between built, agricultural and natural landscapes became increasingly distinct. Villages were tightly developed and there were fewer and fewer farm houses between villages. And forested areas (often worked) gave way to tree lines and granite mountain tops. A few of the areas we drove by reminded us a bit of the High Sierras - we have a lot of exploring to do!
One thing about Portugal is that it gets a lot of its energy from hydropower, which means there are a lot of dams in the mountains. Besides lower energy costs, what that means for us is steadier river flows in the lower elevations and, once we get the Bimobile, a guaranteed place to camp. Portugal has a law that every dam must have an area where people can park and camp! While it’s not going to be like camping on BLM land, it will at least let us get closer to where we may want to be photographing the following morning.
It was interesting to realize that we recognized some of these places from this YouTube Channel - Portugal 365 I think - that tends to do a lot of aerial videos in natural areas of Portugal and that Ann and I have watched quite a bit of. We also passed though some towns we know. Like Soajo (the pin on the track in the map above - the other was a random pin Ann accidentally dropped [like I said, we’re still getting our sea legs back with the tools we use]). It’s worth checking Soajo out because they have these incredible old elevated granaries that are just as interesting in person as they are on video. Granted we didn’t stop because of the crowd of people there, but the granaries are visible from the road (only a few dozen feet off it in fact) and definitely worth returning to when there’s weather (rain, mist, etc) that will likely keep crowds away and give photographs of the structures some character. Even better, a short drive down the road we found a nice creek with a 2-car parking spot (occupied) on the town side of a bridge that crossed a creek that looked like it was good photography material! Like I said, scouting trip.
Exiting the Peneda Gerês National Park to the north brought us out by Melgaço near the Minho River. While you can’t see the river from this image, sloped hilll on the right side of the background is Spain. Unsurprisingly, there are forts up and down this river, on both sides. But, as noted, we’re experiencing a heat wave. And while it was a bit cooler than in Braga, 94 F isn’t much cooler than 97 F, so we skipped a tour of the fort and drove downriver towards Valença.
We’d considered moving to Valença, in part because it seems to have a lot of character and because Ann took a liking to it (as she did Barcelos and a few other towns) from videos we’d watched. Not quite Braga size, but it is the biggest city in the far north. We checked out Trip Advisor and found ourselves a fine Italian restaurant where we had a late lunch. Our drive north had taken almost 6 hours and we were ready for a nice break. When the waiter asked us if we were aware of the time it takes to cook risotto we responded “About 30 minutes or so? We’re in no rush.” The waiter smiled.
So we took our time with an appetizer and some sangria and lemonade in a nice little restaurant. And wound up doing a good hour and a half lunch, but without the mountain of food we had the previous weekend. One of the fun features from the restaurant was a line of Moretti bottles (the go-to beer in an Italian restaurant if you’re not having wine, sangria or a craft brew) that must have been a special edition of Moretti’s because each bottle had a different letter on the label. The bottles lined up to spell the restaurant’s name and then Valenca Portugal. See what I’m talking about . . .
The trip back from Valença to Braga took just under an hour. Think of it, about the time it used to take us to get from Springfield to Salem, OR, we now can get to the border with Spain. Perhaps even better, our 180 mile (289 km) loop, used just a bit over a quarter tank of diesel. Not bad. We ended the trip with 1/2 a tank left (I filled up the tank when we bought the car on July 1st and we’re still at half a tank!). But then again, with the price of gas here, we should be thankful - trips aren’t going to bleed us dry with fuel costs!