Caves & Castles

We had a good nights sleep and left the park up in Aracena just after 9am.
Our first stop was to get fresh water at a free aire that turned out to be incorrectly labelled on park4night and we ended up in a village that had a 6 meter length restriction.
To top that off it was a single street that got narrower and narrower and when we were 400 meters away from where TomTom said the aire was we met 2 on coming cars.
I couldn’t go back but there was a fork in the road that said tourist route but the houses had balconies and they were lower than Wanda.
I jumped out and asked the first driver if he would go down that street and he said yes. The second driver was obviously more competent and reversed the entire length of the road I wanted and then waited for me.
I jumped back in Wanda and cautiously negotiated the narrow streets and when I got to the second driver I waved and shouted out the window. I couldn’t thank him enough.
To top it off the aire wasn’t an aire and the tap was hidden and completely away from the car park and we couldn’t get rid of the grey or black waste.
We carried on driving and it took us 2 hours to reach Sao Dominigos Mine. That is actually the name of the town and we have finally reached Portugal and are nearly at our halfway point.
Sao Dominigos Mine has a newly built aire that cost €7 a night and it’s all electronic. Here there is a man made lake with peddle boats and swimming that is completely free and it is the original site of the Sao Dominigos Mine that opened in 1868 and ran until the 1966s by the British company Mason & Barry.
The town is Located on the left bank of the River Guadiana, this area was mined from Roman times until the early 1960s, when the mine was finally abandoned. The region has the appearance of a ghost town, where the wealth of former times has now given way to industrial archaeology.
What now remains of the former industrial complex are a few of the mine`s structures, the old miners` residential quarter and the platform of the railway line once used to convey the copper ore to the river port of Pomarão (close to the park`s southernmost boundary), where it was put on boats and transported to the estuary at Vila Real de Santo António.
The village, with its roughly 770 houses, grew around the mine and it took 1500 workers to operate the former mine.
It took us just over 3 hours to walk the entire 5km mine and explore all the remaining structures and then hike back. The colours are unbelievable especially when the sun came out, on one hand it is disgusting how humans have left this isolated piece of countryside contaminated with pollution and on the other hand because of the iron pollution it is beautiful.Les mer