Day 30 – still at Pitões das Júnias

Pitões continues to grow on me. Just occasionally, I come across places which I think would be appealing to live, and this is such a place. The hot summer days have much cooler evenings. Winter brings snow occasionally, but it’s is a rarity. There are excellent hiking and cycling opportunities, and the potential view from the window is incredible. The locals are very friendly. More than in other Portuguese villages, dogs live well here. They look healthy, yet wander the streets as if they were strays. A guy walked past me this morning and said hello, with his labrador cross. Very rarely are dogs on the lead, and his wasn’t. I saw his dog later in town, while I took a coffee, without the owner. I have not seen any dog behave antisocially. They all stay outside the bars and cafes, so now Roja does as well, and is quite happy to do so.

There are quite a few properties in the village in need of development, currently derelict. A few are for sale, one, pictured below, with the proposed development marketed, coming in at just under 150,000 euros. At a different time of life I might consider investment.

On those long dark nights of November in front of the fire in Bampton, I researched the route I hiked a variety of today. It is the sixth walk in the Cicerone Walking in Portugal book, but I wanted a circular route, and one that took in more or the higher ground. Part of what Cicerone suggest I walked yesterday.

In recent years the trail PR11 has been launched in the area, so I mixed the two together. There’s a map in the last image in yesterday’s post.

It was a cloudless day, and in the middle of the afternoon, above 20C. Fortunately at this time of year access to drinking water in very common. As the season continues, it would be better to only take it from higher up.

This was a splendid mountain day, with great variety, but the highlight being the ascent up to the chapel on the mountain peak of São João da Fraga.

Strangely, the origin of the chapel is unknown, as is also the reason as to why it was built there.

Every year, on the first Sunday after São João’s feast day many of the inhabitants of Pitões das Júnias follow tradition, whose origin is also unknown, of going up to the top of the mountain in pilgrimage to São João who protects the village. 

Tradition dictates that at the end of the route, with about an hour and a half, the inhabitants celebrate next to an oak forest, eating the snacks previously left there and dancing to the sound of concertinas.

This place is called the Fojo de Lobos, and has quite a bit of history itself. In the Middle Ages this was an enclosure to trap the Iberian Wolf, which, in packs, often caused destruction to sheep and goats, but more of a problem, was that the people believed them to be associated with witchcraft and evil forces. It was the origin of many of the ‘bad wolf’ legends.

It was a five and a half hour journey, and pleasant to relax in the late afternoon sun before the temperature dropped, which it does quite quickly.