For a Map, General Information & More Trails Information about Portugal see my page here
Blog Post about the transition of nomad life from the slow pace of The Azores to the equally slow pace of Northern Portugal. The north of the country remains culturally rich and we experienced the traditional rural life volunteering with Workaway in Terras de Bouro village, where this great location also gave the opportunity to hit the trails in the sublime Geres National Park and the nearby city of Braga.
Picturesque Portugal Travel Blog.
Northern Portugal, November 2021
Places visited in this post:
Terras de Bouro, Gerês National Park, Braga.
Trails done in this post:
PR 08 TBR – Trilho de Couto de Souto, PR 09 TBR – Trilho da Geira, Pé de Cabril, PR 06 - Trilho dos Miradouros, PR 11 - Trilho das Silhas dos Ursos, PR 01 - Trilho da Cidade da Calcedonia.
Jump into:
Volunteering with Workaway in Northern Portugal: The Sweet Chestnut Harvest
The year in The Azores was now over and the search for a new destination took longer than anticipated to complete. With over a 1000 options on Workaway in Portugal, it seemed like it would be easy but we soon started to see that the majority of these didn’t offer anything majorly interesting, nor different from the standard “gardening” or “permaculture” type of places (which generally meant weeding!) Additionally a lot of these were situated in the middle of nowhere, and to sour the deal they were only offering a tent as accommodation most of the time. A week before leaving The Azores, I came across a place in the north of Portugal that seemed to stand out from the crowd and that also came with proper accommodation. Furthermore, the location was a big bonus as it was close to Gerês National Park, one of the best in Portugal you can visit. The volunteer host was in need of help for the imminent Castanha (sweet chestnut) harvest and so we settled on this as the best option for volunteering in northern Portugal for the next 3 weeks or so!
In 700 km long Portugal, you can easily get to any of the major cities from Lisbon in a long afternoon and with an advanced online ticket purchase (e.g. FlixBus, Red Expressos) you’ll still have a lot of virtual change from €10. The journey from Lisbon to Braga (close to the Spanish border) was a 4 hour journey followed by a connection to our final destination - Terras de Bouro, where we received little physical change from €10 for the 1 hour journey on the local bus! After all the Azorean heat, there was a very welcoming chill in the air around here, and while passing through the green, well forested hills it was looking like a decent area to be stationed for a few weeks and adjust to life on the “continent”. We got a real hosts welcome at the Workaway house, where the wine was pouring and where we were getting treated like her friends (who were also there for the evening) and not like unequal’s on a lower rung of the ladder as with some volunteer places. It was a true house of the seventies, in terms of the people, the music, the herbs, the house decor and we got our first introduction to the castanhas in the form of a very tasty soup, complete with mushrooms. As far as first nights go at a volunteering place, it certainly beat any other so far it terms of a welcome! We subsequently started the next day and rest of the week by collecting the castanhas at an easy 70’s pace from the land - all which used to belong to the village church and what was the resident vicar’s house - now our new accommodation. It’s always nice to find yourself in a Workaway placement without having to worry about loads of rules and being checked up on all the time and we were just left to do our own hours with no clock-watching and absolutely no potential eggshells to walk on. A Nice start.
The hardest adjustment that I found during the first week was the dining table process. After almost a lifetime of a meal just being about the food, here it was a borderline formal event and we were averaging almost two hours at the table, for both lunch and then another pair of hours at dinner. Mostly I had cleaned up my plate in three minutes, and afterwards I was just watching someone else’s plate staying in almost constant state, with a reduction rate so slow it was probably decaying just as much as it was being consumed. In a true test of patience (of which I certainly failed), I was mentally celebrating a point each time a mouthful was eaten and thus a step closer to the process ending and being free to do something else. At times I was about to celebrate a point as the fully loaded fork was hovering above the plate, only for it to get put down again at the last minute as another lengthy verbal dialogue was sent to press. As it was all in Portuguese (including a lot of serious topics) I was completely zoned out after 30 minutes, however there was nice wine to numb the pain after putting the chin on automatic nodding dog mode. Also the, the rest seemed to pass by. The stupid English Native Speaker stereotype can sometimes also work in your favour, just like in this situation, not saying anything doesn’t normally create an issue. Really, it was just a first world problem of the low attention-span generation, and after getting used to not having Netflix on while eating, this new routine became the norm and during the whole process we realised one of the “soft roles” of this volunteer placement was to provide some company and a set of ears (even if you couldn’t provide a mouth) in this normally empty house.
Our little village was located just outside of Terras de Bouro (the main town) and it was a typical picture-perfect, friendly and quiet type of place where the locals were all interested to chat to unknown and unfamiliar faces. It was noticeable in the area that most of the houses had a selection of orange, lemon and persimmon trees fully loaded with fruits, but unfortunately the downside to this local inFRUITstructure was that most of them were just ending up on the floor as wasp food. No doubt it was easier for the people to just buy some imported Spanish ones from the supermarket as people from everywhere else do, but for us it created an opportunity to stop some food wastage and quickly grab some 0 km produce - Use it or Lose it! One thing they definitely didn’t let go to waste around here was the corn. Traditionally, each dwelling used to have an outdoor structure for the crop which served to both keep the corn ventilated and also stopped the rats from eating it after the harvest. These small structures are known as “Espiguieros” and some of the houses in the village still had the original stone ones, whereas others had a “modern” concrete one. Either way, the corn tradition lives on and the photogenic original ones were certainly a distinct and interesting thing to see as part of the culture package of the region.
After having collected almost all the castanhas in the opening ten days we were pretty much left to find other jobs at our own will and with the large house and gardens needing a lot of maintenance, it wasn’t hard to find, but it was also a case of where do you start with all this with the little time we had. We scrapped around for a week to pass the hours, collecting and cracking Walnuts, cutting grass with a machete and also making another wooden compost box from pallets, but for sure this place was one of them that wasn’t focused on the work and more about the company and the host helping people out with a room as she had so much space. More interestingly than the current work program was that after being on the virtually fungi-less Azorean islands, I had found myself back amongst the mushrooms for the Autumn European season. However I was without the books, so it was just me, the Shroomify app and the thrill of trying to identify the specimens! I didn’t get around the eating any, but there were for sure some interesting ones about, coming through in both the gardens and in the local woods!
In the last week, amongst the relaxing and winding down in the countryside, we did manage to claim a mini-project on a bit of the land. Portugal is a country pretty overrun with Eucalyptus trees (they don’t lend well to forest fires!) and unfortunately the native trees generally come in second place, and although there were a nice amount of other tree species in this particular valley, there was still a job to be done. The host had an area of freshly cut Eucalyptus trees that she wanted to reforest with a diverse mix and so that was the next job. The seed bank was obviously still healthy on the hill as there were a lot of baby oaks coming through and firstly we marked these with posts to try to keep them out of harm’s way in the coming years. The rest of the time involved the dual-pronged-attack of firstly collecting a LOT of acorns and chestnuts from other areas before dispersing them around, and secondly we also transplanted some sapling’s from other areas hoping they would survive the move. Surely the method was not the most effective nor the most scientific approach, but as it was a no rules, experimental type of place it was fine to just try something and see what happened (in this case, 20 years down the line!)
Before I headed to the national park I decided to warm up with a few trail runs on the only two official routes close enough to Terras de Bouro village that would serve for an extended afternoons run. The PR 8 TBR – Trilho de Couto de Souto and the PR 9 TBR – Trilho da Geira made for two short and medium circuits respectively that involved hiking right up to the ridge for a nice view of the valley whilst passing some more scenic villages and going along some old roman forest roads. Unfortunately without having done proper research beforehand I discovered that the rest of the trails (both in and outside the national park) were pretty much out of range as the local bus schedules didn’t lend so well for getting around, and after multiple failed attempts of hitchhiking, we were pretty limited for anything else to do around here apart from absorb the local life.
Visiting Gerês National Park WITHOUT A CAR
During the final week a trip to Gerês suddenly became possible. We found out that the bus from Braga that went directly to the National Park passed on the other side of the valley, a 20 minute undulating walk away on the back lanes. But even after discovering this, we saw that only the Sunday bus schedule allowed you enough time to explore properly, giving you a nice 6 hour window to see the park without having to worry too much about getting back. We had also looked at options to stay the night, but even the campsite costs were pretty crazy as they were charging motorhome prices regardless of whether you had one or not and so this was not a place for tommy two-man-tent! And so it was settled, just a day trip on Sunday with the bus terminating in the town of Campo de Gerês. The hard bit was actually deciding a route as there were so many options but after choosing one pretty randomly, I set-off up the trail to the Pé de Cabril. The idea was then to drop down to the scenic road afterwards, before looping back over the tops again on another route either to Campo de Gerês or if I wanted to make a more extended route, to Covide (pronounced Covid!) where the bus also stopped.
The trail to Pé de Cabril was pretty much an instant hit, straight into the wild with great landscapes and no one else there for the first part. The terrain was dry, yet it had streams running through the rock formations so it was a win-win, and later on the main climb I passed a guided group who were surprised to see someone running. This immense trail had photo opportunities in all directions and a short while further I had reached the little turn-off from the main path that led steeply up to hike to the Pé de Cabril itself. The formation was essentially a huge rock sat on a peak and I almost skipped it to save time, but in the end I couldn’t resist, and after climbing up a few rungs on some iron bars set into the rock at the end, I was up there to take in the views and it was certainly worth the diversion. It was one of those “on top of the world and no-one else around” feelings and I sat more than content for a while in the warm late autumn sun.
I descended down pretty fast as the trail opened out nicely and after reaching the road I managed to increase the tempo even more so to register some fast kilometres. Down here on the asphalt it was most definitely busy with the “Visit Geres National Park BY CAR” crowd and not the “Visit Geres National Park WITHOUT A CAR” crowd - which was currently totalling just one person! The windy road still made for good views on the switchbacks however, before I subsequently turned off on good looking trail (PR 06 - Trilho dos Miradouros) to ascend the 500m again back to the top. I didn’t see a soul on this steep section, where I almost had to hike its entirety to the above plateau. Here I came to the critical decision point of having to choose to either head straight back to Campo de Gerês or to turn left for an extended run to Covide. Since I was on a Covid World Tour, it had to be the left but time was not in abundance anymore after the slow uphill. I was now on the PR 11 - Trilho das Silhas dos Ursos which was a dirt road on a slight downhill and it was good for banking some fast kilometres again and to get closer to being back on schedule by the end of it.
I reached another surfaced road before I had to cross a random patch of grassland to get onto the official trail above Covide: The PR 01 - Trilho da Cidade da Calcedonia. I had intersected this trail half way around the loop where I now had to choose either clockwise or anti-clockwise. I thought the clockwise option looked more interesting on the map and so I opted for that without really noticing it would involve more ascent and it was also longer in terms of distance. The decision had already been made and I was now descending before realising I only had about an hour to finish before the 18:00 bus, and I still had to ascend back up 200m, drop down 500m into Covide and then find the correct bus stop! The landscape was still spectacular but I was now on maximum possible pace mode as I tried to stay on two legs whilst hurdling over and in-between the boulders. I breached the top and had the village in sight down below, as an American family were on the way up just as I started to fly down. I got some words of encouragement shouted at me in typical Go USA fashion, but this unfortunately only gave me the extra boost to increase the speed by enough to send me horizontal on a switchback as the loose dirt gave way. Luckily I was out just of sight to save the embarrassment and after 10 seconds on the dusty deck it was time to carry on before I missed the deck I actually wanted - the single deck on the bus! I got to the town exactly at 18:00 and went to the only bus stop I saw on the map, yet there was no sign of a bus nor any information at the stop. Soon 10 minutes had passed and I resigned myself to being f*cked by Covid, just as it was starting to get dark. Twenty minutes of failed hitchhiking later, morale was rock bottom, especially as a bus went past in the opposite direction. I watched on as it then suddenly stopped, started to turn around and put a service number on during the manoeuvre. This was it! The last ride out of Covide was 30 minutes late and thank f*ck for that! It was even the same driver who had taken me to Campo in the morning and he couldn’t believe how I got to this new place on foot WITHOUT A CAR in Geres. After a 40 minute ride of relief later, I got off before having to get the legs going again for the 20 minute traverse of the valley (now in the darkness) back to our house. And that was that and by the end of the day, I had got a good day out of Parque Nacional de Gerês, by doing it the only possible way, get the trail running shoes on and hope for the best. WITHOUT A CAR and a set of good legs I had seen ten times more than anyone visiting with their vehicle and the only downside was the lack of a photo in Covide for the photo album!
A Quick Stop in Braga
Our time in Terras de Bouro was done and after three weeks here, it had been a good stay in the rural north with a welcoming host, and upon departure we even got offered access to a mountain of second hand clothes that her children had left from the turn of the millennium! After 12 months of travelling, my t-shirts were ready for the bin and I could now wear a retro Nike t-shirt that wasn’t overly stretched. The next destination was Braga, where we decided to spend two nights on the way back. Well, I’d just arrived at the door at 19:00 from Geres and now I was preparing for the 07:00 bus to Braga which meant a repeat walk (with full luggage now) across the dark valley lanes to the bus stop again! Each dog in the village was alerted as we passed the rural houses and when we got to the bus stop, there was another woman also waiting. It was deja-vu as 20 minutes later, I was at a bus stop with no sign of a bus! You know when the locals give up, it’s probably not coming, but it’s much easier to have patience when you are stuck at the side of the road in the dark with 20kg and no other options. To our delight, five minutes later it arrived and the lady had lost her day in Braga, and for us that was another Workaway experience complete.
We had a Couchsurfing lined up in Braga, staying with a Brazilian girl who had a nice apartment and a shower to die for after the (very) low flow and luke-warm rural one in Terras de Bouro! There was plenty to see in Braga, with the highlight being the stunning Basilica de Bom Jesus do Monte that sits on a hill looking down on the city. For sure it’s pretty unique and not to be missed - especially if you are thinking (like I had done) that it’s going to be another standard Iberian cathedral. The short but sweet Northern visit was over, my second time in the region after having done the Caminho Portuguese a few years ago and now I had liked it just as much as the first time; experiencing the authentic villages, traditional culture, greenery and cooler temperatures. One thing is for sure in Portugal though, nice cooler temperatures outside can make for unpleasant cold damp ones inside, and now at the end of October we were following the heat again towards an Indian summer in the Algarve (via another pair of cheap buses!)
If you made it to the end, please leave your anonymous final thought to help with feedback:
I wish I'd watched paint dry instead...
Now I want to go to Northern Portugal and Gerês!
Found some nice tips and ideas for my trip
Found it funny and /or interesting
