PENEDA-GERÊS NORTH
As hinted at in the last blog post, on our last excursion Ann and I headed to the northern part of the Peneda-Gerês National Park to see what it had to offer. Join us to see what we found.
In addition to a blue door and a giant swing, we found a couple of different areas that, once it’s no longer tourist season, may be worth revisiting and, more importantly, photographing. As the Porta do Sol story noted, we’d found an area to photograph that delayed our return to the door. Much of the forested area in Portugal has a lot of underbrush, which is always difficult to photograph, but we passed by one section that was fairly open and was ripe with images.
We initially drove by, noting it for the return drive in case something better was up ahead. When we hit the end of the paved road a few miles down, we simply turned around and pulled over on our way back. I took a few sketch images with my point and shoot camera, and then saw a tree that made me think I should pull out the bigger camera.
Other than the elegant curves of this tree and the ferns below, I’m not sure why I was captivated by it. But that never stopped me before, so I worked on a couple of subtly different framings of the branch. There’s something calming about standing knee-deep in a bed of ferns when making an image.
As I developed the images, I thought I should try one of the images in black and white, and decided to use one that had a shallower depth of field to bring out the branch that first caught my eye.
We spent quite a while there; the first time in a long time that Ann and I just wandered an area, often quite a distance apart. And I eventually crossed the road and settled on a tree branch that faced an open area that let the overcast light illuminate the branches, but not the tree trunks on the far side of the opening.
I then came across another open area, not sure whether it was the remnants of a road or whether the rocks in a line were natural or placed by people. This whole part of the park has been inhabited for quite some time. There are plenty of neolithic (Celtic) structures and evidence of human work from many, many centuries ago. Sometimes it’s hard to tell what is man-made, and even when you can it’s often hard to tell when it was built.
For most of our time photographing that session we were fortunate to have overcast skies. But as our photography came to an end, the sun started peaking through. More likely than not, it was the sun that put the photographing to an end, but regardless, after awhile you become mentally exhausted and it’s time to pack up and move on. But not after one last shot made available by the changed conditions.
Just afterwards is when we visited the door. From there we kept driving up to the far north on a route we took the first time we drove through the park just over a year ago, passing through Peneda (a town we must get back to . . . when there aren’t a zillion tourists there) and a couple of possible photography locations on the flats just above. Eventually we turned right (south) instead of left (north), to explore the northeasternmost part of the park. The route looped around the mountains and on the back (Eastern side) with Spain to the left and the mountains to the right. We had our choice of north-south roads and decided to explore both of them.
We first took the westernmost of the two roads along the base of the tallest mountains and eventually came across an old Roman bridge. It’s not much, but it’s been there for pretty much forever. Which often can’t be said about things in the US. It’s still so interesting to me the age differences in structures between the old and the new worlds.
At the bridge was an old mill, probably built well after Roman times. Not much of it was left other than the stone structure and the millstone.
The reason for the bridge was a small creek, which was obviously needed by the mill. It being summer, the creek was running very low. But the banks told a story of a much more forceful flow during the spring runoff or fall rains.
The road eventually narrowed and we turned around a few miles before the Spanish border, only to drive a mile or so east after backtracking and heading south again. Once more we had to turn around before the border (we didn’t have our passports and had no interest in being too adventurous) and back-track to head home.
As we came back up the valley and started heading back towards Castro Laboreiro (another very interesting looking town that went from not-too-terribly-busy to Disneyland-packed in the hour and a half between our driving through the town), we pulled over at a lovely overlook just as the sun started peaking through the clouds again.
It was a nice view of this rough, rocky landscape.
In-between the lovely forested area we found in the morning and a few rocky landscapes in the afternoon, and the towns of Peneda and Castro Laboreiro, we’ve got the makings of a nice photo trip or two once we get the bimobil and can camp out in this area. It has lots to offer . . . in the off-season of course!