After our strenous 20 km day cycling yesterday, we decided to explore the area around Pinhao on foot. It’s crazy steep and a bicycle exploration just didn’t seem to make sense.
We stopped at the recommended butcher in town to pick up some lunch meat. He had cheese and even had buns, so we were set for the day. Lots of samples, and chose on some delicious smoked meat and a milder cheese (for me). Don’t ask me what the dried animal was all about. I just found it interesting that it was socially acceptable to have that hanging on the wall with all the slabs of ham!
Since we are in Portugal, it wouldn’t be a proper day without some blue tiles. These were from the train station in town and showed real life, not religious scenes. The whole station was covered in these panels, here are 2 for a sample.
It makes sense to use local material wherever possible to reduce costs. In this area, there is a lot of natural slate. Exploring an abandoned building, I found a stack of long slate that I wasn’t sure what it was for, but it must have had a purpose!
It turns out they have multiple uses. As we continued our journey through the day, we found them in different uses.
As we wandered up the roads and through the vineyards, we could see all the rock work as well as some of the more modern terracing techniques that don’t involve rock. The rock terraces date back 100’s of years and aren’t built anymore as it’s too expensive. We learned all about this at the Taylor Fladgate audio tour in Porto.
It seemed that a lot of the older stone terraces (not all) were planted with olive trees. We speculate that it’s because they weren’t always designed with machinery in mind and it would be too labour intensive to produce grapes commercially there.
Of course, one can’t walk through vineyards without stopping for a wine tasting š
It was interesting to see all the new excavations as terraces are built and planted.
We came across the most wee grape vines! It’s interested that all the grape varieties here are planted on American (native) grape vine root stock (grafted) or are a hybrid of American varieties. An insect pest (Grape phylloxera) was introduced from America in the late 19th century which wiped out much of the European grapes. For more information, visit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phylloxera.
We ended back in town and went for a nice dinner.
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