I promise that this is my final ‘oh wow, I loved it’ back-trip through my Douro jaunt. I know how boring it can be when people sit you down and show you all their holiday photographs and you’re sitting there thinking “why?” as in “why does this dear friend, who I know and love, think I would be remotely interested in any of this stuff?”
One of my joys in Clive was that whenever I came back from a trip, he would sit quietly and let me ramble on until I ran out of steam…even if he had serious news to share with me on stuff that had happened while I’d been away. So, although I won’t share all my pics with you – unless you ask and then on your own head be it – I will get excited about lots of stuff that will mean nothing at all to you. Probably. Sorry.
And it is a long one…because I want to get it all down now…so, like I said last week, feel free to skip this one. Normal service will be resumed shortly.
Remember the first time you drank Mateus Rosé?
I get the impression that the Portuguese are a little embarrassed by Mateus, but if you’re of a certain age (mine!) you will remember when it was the height of sophistication in Britain. We weren’t wine-drinkers back then. A little sherry or port at Christmas, communion wine in church unless you were Methodists in which case the symbolism was even more symbolic by not even being alcoholic. Drinking wine at dinner was only just filtering in, mostly via Italian restaurants, so why it should have been a Portuguese wine that flourished I’m not sure.
Perhaps it was the unusual shape of the bottle, inspired by the water flasks carried by soldiers during the Great War. Perhaps it was that rosé was a gentle introduction to wine to a nation that had not been brought up on subtle whites and robust reds.
I remember being introduced to it. It was my 18th birthday, and I was taken out to dinner by my boyfriend of the time. He’s a story I’d best draw a veil over, but he was out to impress me – easily done – I’d never been taken to dinner before. The Station Hotel was probably as insalubrious as it sounds, but what did I know? Sheltered upbringing and all that. I can’t remember what we ate. I can remember the table and the two of us, pretending this was something that would last. It didn’t see out the end of the year. I doubt the restaurant had a wine list, but that didn’t matter because he knew what he wanted to order.
So: confession…I like Mateus Rosé. I did then. I do now. I know that feels like saying I enjoy a Big Mac, but to be honest, that too, on occasion, just not all the time. I rarely drink rosé these days, but when that is what I feel like, Mateus is what comes to mind.
In my defence, I never kept a bottle to stick a candle in or make a lamp from!
The reason for this meander down memory lane was a visit to the Palácio de Mateus. We were warned ahead of time not to ask for a glass of the pink stuff, because the manor house has very little to do with the wine.
The wine itself has no long pedigree. It was developed after the Second World War by local wine producer Fernando Van Zeller Guedes, who spotted a gap in the market for a sweet, slightly fizzy, easy-drinking wine, but wine is a business built on association and reputation, so (as the story was told to us) said winemaker approached the loosely neighbouring lord of the manor and asked if he could use a picture of the house on the label of his bottles. A deal was done for a license at half an escudo per bottle sold. Overnight the lord of the manor re-thought his position – seriously, who in their right mind is going to drink sweet, fizzy, pink wine? He re-negotiated a flat fee, a one-off payment, and a 40% premium on the price of grapes from the estate. Possibly not the best deal of his life. The estate did not produce that many grapes, and the wine took most of its input from elsewhere. The product has changed over the years but it still sells, globally, around 20 million bottles a year. How ever you reckon it, that's a lot of half-escudos.
Ouch!
The winery got a good deal.
Meanwhile, we went to explore the manor house behind the label.
The current building is 18th century baroque built for António José Botelho Mourão, the 3rd Morgado de Mateus. Morgado is not a title as such, it simply means heir, generally the first-born son who will inherit the family estate.
The iconic view of the house, seen from across the lake (use the word loosely), is best caught early in the morning before everyone else arrives. We were lucky enough to do that. The waters were still, and while the sky wasn’t as crystal clear as we might have liked, the reflection was perfect. João Cutileiro’s Sleeping Woman, allegedly designed to disrupt the ‘symmetry’ of the architecture, created her own near-perfect other half. She does look peaceful…the water-washed half perhaps being her dream self.
My days of buying guide books and trying to absorb all the detail are long gone. I take only what takes me. At Mateus it was the sleeping beauty in the lake. It was the two hundred year old yews. It was the carved chestnut ceilings, the wood chosen because of its resistance to humidity and
infestation...chestnut, not cedar as I thought!
It was, as it always is in country houses, the mother of pearl table top, the Japanese laquer-work on cabinet fronts…it was “The Library” – even if I can’t remember what was so special about the special books, their age, their first-edition print on vellum value, even what they were – I loved the room – wanted to know what all those books are – thought about all the ones in my own library that I have not yet read - wondered how many of those at Mateus had been put on shelves and never touched again except for the dusting.
It was the gardens. The yew tunnel, higher and deeper and older than the one at Blickling. All the intricately designed box hedging, trimmed to perfection. Manuel Casimiro’s Painted Garden – raked sand and standing stones. The grape-vine pathway. The old, rusting wine-making kit, left out as objets d’art. The flowering cactus against the chapel wall.
It was the woodland that I didn’t have time to fully explore.
Perhaps it was actually the fact that no-one tried to sell me a guide-book. Was there a shop? Probably. I may have simply missed it. I’m told there was somewhere to buy coffee – inside and just outside over the road. I didn’t have time for such things..too much wander space…too many things to look at, to absorb, to simply be alongside.
Barca d’Alva / Salamanca
Barca d’Alva is where the Douro stops (or rather starts) being a purely Portuguese river. It’s about a kilometre from where the river becomes the Portuguese / Spanish border. It’s also about the extent of the navigable waterway for the cruise ships. Once a famous rail terminus, it is now in decline. Once a crossing point into Spain by rail as well as water, the closure of that section of the line was followed by the loss of the Pocinho connection. As a rail-travel lover, I’m deeply saddened when links are cut – because it is always the beginning of wider decline in the area. I keep hoping that the powers that be will realise that the motor car and the road network are not the answer. Mass transport systems, rail & water freight, these things need to be revitalised for the sake of the local communities and the sake of the planet. It is a frail hope, but I’m holding on to it.
We didn’t get to walk around Barca d’Alva, but photographs of the abandoned station as it was in 2017 have a haunted look to them.
Meanwhile, we left the village, all of its population of about 100 – roughly the same number as were on our tour – to their olive groves, and almond trees and vineyards, as we headed over the border to Salamanca.
~
There are times when being on an organised excursion gets you to places you otherwise wouldn’t go – and then there are the times when you know that you are just the commodity. This was the latter.
As it was told to us, tour guides in Spain are heavily unionised and there is no leeway for anyone outside to take a tour. Add into that: a ‘city walking tour’ is an hour - literally. Not roughly, not depending on how interested you are, or what diversions you might want to build in. I won’t name names, but someone said: these guys are speedy gonzales and they take no prisoners.
Yes.
Our guide was lovely and funny and informative, but she was also on the clock.
Much as I’d love to weave rhapsodic about the town, I can’t. We saw so little of it. We had information scatter-gunned. Go look it up – it’s all there on the web. We had a poor experience of it. The walking tour was rushed and lunch was stretched…
…ah lunch…I’m not going to name the restaurant to protect the guilty. Everyone I spoke to felt that there was too much food, too slow service, too much time wasted that we could have spent wandering around outside in the backstreets – or having a more immersive experience in the Casa Lis – the art deco / art nouveau museum that could have taken a whole afternoon of my time. Mam would have loved all of the Lalique – there were whole rooms that had me wanting to plan a heist – which is probably why they would not allow any photography.
What I do remember of the day…
…the storks nesting around the city, the way the municipality had provided cages to support the nests, and the way the storks just ignored them;
…the symbolism of the frog: it sits on a skull on the façade of the cathedral – to some it is a symbol of good luck (for students in passing exams, for tourists a return to the city), but to others the frog is a symbol of sin, specifically of lust;
…the astronaut, floating in space, also carved onto the frontispiece of the cathedral;
…the height of the dome, that made the dove in the centre look so small – 90 metres above the ground, the three-meter wing span looks like it could picked between finger and thumb;
…the faded graffiti on the university walls, the privilege of those who’d passed their exams, back in the day;
…the house of shells (whose purpose I never grasped) I remembered for the courtyard where a chess tournament was ongoing and for the photography exhibition on the upper quadrangle floor: Santiago Santos’s Before Landscape - composite pictures of natural walls (forests or thickets) from where landscape as we’d imagine it cannot be seen – the panels are not contiguous in origin but it takes a while to see that they are not a whole, but rejoined fragments – the four seasons represented ~ an artwork I want to come back to, to try either to understand or to see what it says to me;
…the indoor market where ordinary people were doing ordinary shopping, and maybe tourists were buying artisanal foodstuffs.
The thing I remember most was sitting on a plinth near the cathedral. A man was playing classical Spanish guitar, seemingly just for the pleasure of it. People stopped to listen but there was no sign of a busker’s hat. A wedding was about to take place… our Spanish guide had told us that booking a wedding in the cathedral had to be done five years in advance, so “you book the wedding, then you go look for the groom” – I’m not sure how much she was joking. I sat and watched the fashion parade. I didn’t get to see the bride, but the families and friends were elegant in their suits and their gowns, all the slim and beautiful ladies in their beautiful summer frocks and high heals, the make-up and hair immaculate, their men stiff in their Sunday best, the groom (I presumed) in his naval dress uniform. Whoever they were, I wish them long life and happiness.
Almeida
Why is it that organised tours give you less than half a day in a place that you’ll need half a week (at least) to explore? Is it to tempt you back again? I have no idea how I would get back to Almeida under my own steam – unless I could hitch a ride with the swathe of bikers that came rolling in a mid-day: now that is one other brilliant way to see Portugal. I say swathe because I’m avoiding the word ‘gang’ – they were too polite and happy (in a contented, joyful, rather than masochistic way) to come anywhere close to a ‘gang’. They were clearly on tour, complete with the T-shirts, which I was too embarrassed to photograph and didn’t get the chance to ask about.
So leaving them to their lunch, back to the place itself.
The official bit: the fortress dates from the 12th Century and was remodelled in the 14th,and again in the 17th. Much of the older structures fell to storms and enemy raids – the most recent of which being the French in August 1810 which pretty much laid the town waste, converting it (according to the information boards) to a dreadful pile of rubble.
If we take that as read, then the rebuilding of it is even more interesting.
It is billed as a fortress, but is more of a walled town. If you live in the UK and have even a passing interest in mediaeval fortifications, you will recognise the star-shaped outline, from some of our coastal castles, projecting bastions to protect each other and the curtain walls between them. Almeida took the star to its ultimate expression.
If you live in the UK and have visited our own survivals from that period and earlier ones, you will be familiar with the dry moat, the ramparts, the gun emplacements, the sally ports and all the rest. What you will not recognise is the modern town – or perhaps village –that survives or has been rebuilt within the still-intact walls.
I wanted to walk the walls – on them and below them – but I also wanted to wander the streets and lanes – to go shopping – to sit in the square – find a backstreet coffee shop – to watch the riding school horses – to understand each and every building, what it was, what it is now…but time did
not allow.
To be fair to our tour-leaders, they have learned that what people want from Almeida is different, person to person, so they did not even attempt to give us a guided-tour. They gave us a map and a time to be back at the gate: go play, they said. I did…but playtime was all too short.
I had no time for military history – not my thing in any case.
Somehow I never did find my way to the clock tower which stands on the spot of the original castle keep and now in the middle of the town cemetery. Next time.
Things I remember…
- the Casa da Roda dos Expostos – such a mediaeval concept, but this one dated 1843; apparently reinstituted as a mechanism in the 19th century by royal decree in Portugal & its colonies. The Roda is a turntable built into the wall of a building – in this case to receive an unwanted baby anonymously. Within the close rooms beyond the rotating window was a small community of nuns dedicated to the care of such children. Presumably most were simply unhappy accidents befallen on destitute parents trying to do their best by the life they’d created – and hopefully the church found caring families for them. I do not know how much truth there might be in the story our guide spun for us: that it was also the case that ladies of a certain class, also befell such unhappy accidents and also resorted (after a time away from public scrutiny) to the charity of the nuns, but with a different aim in mind… that with certain funds having been made for the interim care, after a certain time, such a lady might befall herself of a charitable frame of mind and decide to adopt a child from the care of the church, a child that
might grow up to bear a surprising resemblance to its adoptive mother. I want that spindrift to be true. I suspect many more were the children of the poor and that their future lives
were no better nor worse than if they had been held at home. - the surprise of streets where centuries old cottages are being done up, freshly painted, new shutters on their tiny windows, hard against those with damp-ridden walls or collapsing
roofs - tiny one-room dwellings that might once have been stables or storage sheds
- cobbled alleys, where doors open directly onto the street, unexpected bunting strung across the way, a sudden pot of red begonia
- decrepit properties with the doors held closed by bright blue fisher-boat twine
- poppies among the ruins
- how low the doorways were...
Above all was the shock of modernity – the municipal library, the registry office, the town hall, the
health centre, the shops and cafés – and a lingering question as to whether this is a desirable place to live, does the kudos raise the house-prices, or does the goldfish bowl effect lower them? Are there rules about who can live here, like there are in our own Cathedral Close, do you have to face a selection committee? If it comes to that: who does live here? Are there families? Children? Teenagers? What is it like on an average Saturday night? Do they close the gates at night?
Of course, Vila De Almeida extends beyond those old city walls – the fire station, concert hall, sports stadium, swimming pool etc are all in the town below, where I suspect most tourists never venture – and so again: maybe next time.
Coa Museum
We weren’t going to get anywhere near the actual site where the prehistoric carvings are, but the museum is worth the visit for trying to understand how the palaeontologists work out what they’re looking at, when all I can see are scratches on rocks. Scratches that overlay other scratches.
Perhaps it is the relatively new technique of projecting coloured light tracings over the marks that bring the individual pictures out of the mêlée that helps that understanding – it certainly does for
the layman. One of the things I liked most about the interpretation we were given was that the simple “we do not know” – as in we do not know if these pictures were shamanism, or story-telling, or sign-posting or pure decoration – they do however clearly depict animals, and seem to attempt to show some of them in motion.
According to the UNESCO description there are some 5,000 figures in the Coa site area, carved between 22,000 and 8,000 BCE. I cannot vouch for the dating – I have no idea how they do it…and equally I cannot get my head around those numbers.
In the morning I had been marvelling at structures from a couple of hundred years ago, and now I’m trying to contemplate a human society – one with a culture, with art, which means imagination, dreams, ambitions – somewhere between ten and twenty-odd thousand years ago.
Reflecting on it now, two or three weeks later, it makes me ponder how much has changed in those thousands of years – and also how little. In particular, how little we have changed. Tools, technology, knowledge – yes – but wisdom, ambition, greed, humanity? I figure: not so much really. We still worship invisible gods – be they enshrined in religions or not – we still make art – for purposes that those who look at it may never understand.
And I wonder about the artists…the men, women or children who sat by those rocks, chiselling, punching, abrading…what were they thinking as they did it? Were they artists – people with vision – or artisans, being paid by the hour, in food and warmth and protection, told what to depict? Two things for sure: firstly, that they couldn’t conceive of their work being talked about thousands of years later, and secondly, that ours will not be – none of our culture and art will survive so long. That’s a little humbling.
Quinta Do Tedo
It has to be done, doesn’t it? The wine-tasting, I mean. It would be rude not to. The fact is that we’d all been drinking Portuguese wine all the way up-river…most of us not paying any attention to
what it was beyond the white, red, rosé demarcations. Occasionally, one of us at dinner might pick up a bottle to read the label because we particularly liked it, but I didn’t see anyone taking notes. Perhaps those in the know, hold such things in the mind. I am not in the know.
What I know is that I’m a white-wine person, rather than red – that I don’t like “oaked” wines – that actually I’m not a great fan of fortified wines either (Port, Sherry etc) – I had my champagne moment a few years ago and am over it now .
But I was curious about the process. This particular Quinta is a small family-run business, a blend of French and American heritage, supplementing its winery income with accommodation that I’d love to sample, if only the logistics of getting there were feasible. Because of its size and the terrain, it operates on traditional principles so far as possible (and legal – given the changes in such things). Grapes are hand-picked, and foot trodden. Ethical & authenticity reasons aside, there are practical rationale: the robot pickers used in some vineyards in the U.S. and in France cannot handle uneven terrain of the Douro: their laser sightings miss more grapes than they find because of the twisting angles of view; also it seems that machine treading isn’t sensitive enough. I’m told that you want the tannin from the grape skin, but not that from the seeds (which makes the wine bitter), so you need to crush the grape, but not the seed.
I love that as a metaphor: crush the skin, but not the seed.
Oh and apparently seedless grapes don’t make good wine.
Technical bits…
Fortified wine is achieved by stopping the fermentation by adding a distilled grape spirit, called aguardente, similar to brandy. There is skill in judging when to do this. It preserves some of the natural sweetness that makes Porto, Porto.
Yes, Porto is the protected designation. Not Port. Port wine can come from anywhere. Porto comes exclusively from Portugal’s Douro Valley, the first delimited viticultural appellation in the world, defined by a strict, physical boundary.
Other random facts...it is traditional that the women pick the grapes and the men carry the baskets from the lines to the carts. The traditional shoulder-hoisted basket held 40 kilos of grapes. Nowadays, the limit carried in one load is around 25 kilos. While I'm sure the Portuguese would love to claim this is a health & well-being shift, it's actually an economic one. At 40 kilos the grapes at the bottom of the basket are crushed by the weight of those above and begin to ferment before they reach the processing shed. Efficiency, waste reduction, not worker well-being – but hey, if that’s a by-product, don’t knock it.
And all of that before we get into the size of the barrels and the mysteries of micro-oxidisation...the
difference between Ruby and Tawny…
…and I did not know there was such a thing as ‘white’ (or more accurately ‘blush’) port, which naturally I liked more than any of the others.
Beacuse yes. Then we sat down to taste.
I want to go on…but…read it elsewhere. Check out their website: https://www.quintadotedo.com
The tasting was just that. Four wines, explained and tasted. A little bread and ham and cheese to go along with it, presumably to stop you confusing the taste between one wine and the next. No spitting. This is a sampling, not a contest tasting. One of our folk made the observation afterwards that there were tables where there’d been only a sip from each glass – and tables where all of the glasses were empty!
Naturally I wasn’t sat at the former variety. There was a general agreement around my table that one of the four, we would not give you good money for – the ‘notes of engine oil’ comment was a tad harsh – but we all agreed it was least likely to be drunk again. Of the others, we differed in our choices. In the end it does all come down to taste.
Lamego / Nossa Senhora dos Remédios
Finally, the sanctuary of Nossa Senhora dos Remédios – our Lady of the Remedies. Strange word ‘remedies’. The web suggests that in the middle ages remedium (remedy) and redemptio (redemption) were used interchangeably. Rescue and healing, saving and salvation.
As we were driven almost to the door of the church, high on its hill, and saved the pilgrimage foot route of 686 steps upwards, I’m not sure how many of our prayers would have been attended. In any event, few seemed to be offering up anything – neither supplication nor gratitude. Interest was mainly in the grandiose decoration, a mixture of baroque and rococo within the chapel and the shifting view of the whole as we paused on each of the terraces on the way down. The external blue & white tile panels are suffering degradation – perhaps simple wear and tear, perhaps vandalism, perhaps souvenir hunting.
From the street below, the view of the rise, and the church at the top is as simple a metaphor as you could wish for… whether you choose to see it as one of an ascent into heaven, or at least into godliness, or one of the power of the church over the lower orders, is up to you.
I’m never sure what I make of such places. I can admire the artistry, the engineering. I can even understand the nature of ‘faith’ – intellectually at least. Living without it (in the religious, believing in a deity sense of faith), it is not something I can properly relate to. And as ever I look to the money: the dedication date states 1857, but one source suggests building work wasn’t finished until 1905, that’s a lot of time and artists and artisans and all the rest – to the glory of god and the virgin no doubt – but I can but wonder what good such funds might have done in the world if otherwise deployed.
And yet, and yet…I did pause by the panels and fountains on the terraces, I did take pictures of the blue and white ceiling with its images of flowers, and sheaves of corn, and musical instruments, of
the grotto with the make-believe waterfall…
When I regained the street below, in the square with its statues of the four seasons, I found water altars, unintended beauty where early leaves had fallen and the light made mosaics of the surface
of the pools. I think they spoke more directly to me. Perhaps it is no surprise then that when I went into the cathedral the thing that I was most taken with was the altar piece – a carved, layered, beautifully lit rendition of a wide-branching tree – not the ‘tree of life’ – but maybe what the crucifix may have grown into had it taken root in the ground where it was planted…
One of the random things I came away with was this quote from John Steinbeck: People don’t take trips, trips take people. I think that’s true. Every one brings something different back with them, because they were taken somewhere different while they were there.
If you’ve made it this far through the read, thank you!
I confess that my main reason for writing all of this up is purely selfish. I want to catch as much as I can of what I remember and what I have since discovered, because all of it is a map of things I have not yet grasped, things I have forgotten, clues to what else it was I was supposed to learn.
Some day I will come back to these scattered pieces of memory and maybe they will trigger other moments, or maybe they will seed more investigation, or maybe they won’t…
and maybe they might do something not too dissimilar for you. Or not.
~ / ~
