The last blog post featured our walks. I suppose I need to start this one with the fact that today’s Friday walk has been cancelled. This is partly because it’s boiling hot, 35ºC, but also because the sky is heavy with smoke and it’s a bit depressing being outside. The main culprit is the monster fire in the Peneda-Gerês National Park, a 30 minute drive from us. In fact it was where we went for our latest walk. Right now…
In many traditional Portuguese houses the ground floor was often used for non-living purposes: keeping animals, storing foodstuffs, making wine etc. The house next to our rented one was full of their produce: onions hanging in plaits from wooden beams, potatoes supported in hessian sacks, wooden boxes full of eggs, buckets and buckets of dried beans; it was choc-a block with goodies and cobwebs. This house, Casa Lima, used the ground floor for making wine. It contained huge wooden barrels,…