Serra de Castelo de Vide

This morning Marla was better at sleeping for a bit longer, but still getting us up before 7am…. at least she was less demanding for her breakfast this morning.

After breakfast we decided to go exploring and take the scenic route to the local town of Castelo de Vide. I’d found a public route on Strava that was around 10km that was mostly off road, so we decided to follow that (despite Charlie’s terrible luck when it comes to following other people’s Strava routes). I’m pleased to say that following the route was no problem at all!

It was a mixed bag of terrain, we started off on the side road from camp and followed it up, up and up where once we’d gone past the last house on the road, it turned into a narrow footpath that was really well maintained in terms of vegetation and trees. The path itself was a mix of rock and grass - fairly easy to walk on. It then carried on as a mixture of cobbles and dirt track all the way into the town. Then it was just a case of following small side roads until we got to the centre of town. It was interesting to see that some of the trees have residual fire damage - you can see a line on them where their bark has been damaged. And all the olive trees we saw were all at the same height, so it looked like they’d all be re-planted at the same time.

We arrived at about 11:30am, and considering that it’s Tuesday today - we were pretty surprised to walk into the town square where there was some sort of event happening. There was a big stage with people speaking to a fairly large crowd of people, with lots of police around. We had no idea what was going on, but it looked fairly serious so we headed off in the opposite direction to find a shop for some fresh bread.
I’ve looked this up since we got back and it turns out it was the Ceremonies of the Territorial Command Day of the GNR of Portalegre.

The walk back followed a slightly different route to start with, which included up a lot of stairs, and then a short, sharp hill to get up into the woodland. We came across a fun looking cave - but up close it was pretty tiny.

Back to camp for a late lunch, showers and a spot of sunbathing while the sun was still warm.

Dinner tonight was stuffed pasta in a tomato sauce.

It’s turned windy, wet and a bit chilly now, so this evening we caught up on a bit more Taskmaster.Read more