Here is my second blog, reflecting back on my first three weeks in Portugal. These weeks were quite busy and the focus of our efforts was clearly on getting miniCLAMPS up and running at the lower Orange Site. Most days we were busy from early in the morning until late in the evening, often catching up with family and work email close to midnight.
However, we had two days when we decided to have short excursions in the late afternoon, leaving Alvaiade after the daily planning meeting. On the first trip we ended up in Castelo de Vide and Mavrao, and Liz already wrote a nice blog about these two cities.
On our second excursion on May 3rd we drove to Monsanto, a small town perched on a hill among large boulders close to the Spanish Border. Monsanto was designated as a UNESCO world heritage site and has also been called the “the most Portuguese village of Portugal”. There are indications of settlements as early as the ice age, the Romans had a settlement followed by the Moors, before it was recaptured by Portuguese Kings in the 12th century and given to the Knights of the Templars.
Similar, to Mavrao and Castelo de Vide, Monsanto offers fantastic views of the landscape in the region:
Inside the village, the integration of the village into the natural landscape is very unique:
The ruins of the castle are also quite impressive and we also witnessed some celebrations for the Festival de la Cruz, which goes back to a siege by the Romans during the second century BC.
We hiked up to the castle following one of the longer, rougher paths that brought us to the leaning boulders:
It was a short but wonderful trip. The only disappointment was, that all restaurants seemed to be closed for dinner. We then had the idea to make a quick trip to Spain and eat dinner there, but we ran into the same problem that the restaurants were only open for lunch. So, after a good Spanish coffee we drove back to Alvaiade
-Petra