Our hike today involves exploring some villages in the Tarouca Valley. We discovered hamlets and villages in the hills around the Tarouca valley, south of the Douro. The walk started by the windmills and ridges to drop down into an ancient and abandoned town, down through a ravine and along the lower valley to three villages before catching the bus back to to Reguo.
We got up this morning to catch the bus which will take us to the start of the hike. The 30 minute drive out of town was very interesting since the area we headed is on secondary roads until we arrived a small village. The village was very quiet and we did not see anyone around, however it was very pretty with the freshly painted walls and clean cobbled streets.
We left town to head into the country. We climbed upward to discover great views down into the valleys where we could see other villages nestled. Our first goal is to follow the tracks and trails around the countryside to locate and explore an abandoned village.
The village, once we found it was not totally abandoned but it was not apparent that anyone still lives there. There were vegetable gardens planted and tools for farming laying around. Even a couple of the ‘houses’ had sturdy looking doors. The village was a grouping of houses made from stones and roofed in a variety of ways.
From here we continued to explore the countryside and dropped down into a ravine as our route out of the hills back to the valley. In the ravine we found a creek flowing and also an irrigation flume carrying water off to a village at the top of the valley.
Before we finished the day we had visited 2 more villages in the valley meeting and greeting several locals. We enjoyed looking at the patterns of agriculture crops (mostly grapevines) in and round the valley with a variety of methods of planting. In one village we walked by a well known ceramic tile designer’s workshop and noted a sample of his work on the outside wall.
Today was a long trek as one of the fellows had his GPS with him and we record a 17 km total hike and the temperature was about 32 degrees C. We left the hotel around 9 and were on the hike before 10 but did not get to the end of the hike until 4 pm. The bus was due to pick us up at 4:30 so this gave us time to head into the small villages ‘cafe’ for refreshments (beer was so good and only cost 80 cents per glass)! We all felt that the trek from the 2nd village to the final village was just one hour too long considering the heat, but we all did agree that it was a good day – now get us to the hotel so we can shower and cool off!
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