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Published: September 28th 2006
Marvao
The castle of Marvao and the city walls seen from the highway below. Note, the camera was zoomed in as far as it could go. To the naked eye...the castle was hard to distinguish against the outline of the moutain.Queridos amigos,
I went to the hometown of my host mom Valéncia de Alcántaras this weekend. It is a town of about 1000 people and less that 20 km from the border with Portugal. We stayed at the home of her son, David, outside of Valéncia in an even smaller village called San Pedro (de Alcántaras). The San Pedro mountains are beautiful and are high, narrow ridges of granite that start abruptly and continue into Portugal. The region is very rural and I am sure the goats, pigs, and cattle out-number the people by quite a lot. There are extensive olive and cork tree farms through out the area and David even has three cork trees in his backyard. The cork trees are stripped of bark every 7 years and when they are freshly stripped, the exposed layer is a bright terra-cotta red. The red fades to a brown and then back to grey as more cork grows. It is interesting to drive past the cork groves because you get a rough idea of when the last time the cork was harvested from each tree. I am excited to go back to see David because he told me he would
Altitude
I was standing on a defense wall when I took the picture. When you look down from the wall, the whole world is beneath you. Really, really far beneath you. take me to the cork factory his friend owns.
David took me to Marvao in Portugal to see the castle and the town. Marvao is at the very top of a lopsided mountain that is much higher than any of the surrounding ones. At the end of a long road consisting of entirely hairpin turns, we reached the first layer of medeival defense walls surrounding the city. There are as many as three or four walls in some places. The town of Marvao is small and completely within the old walls. The streets are very narrow and very steep. Above the town is a large castle with nearly everything intact. We went down into the cistern (where rain water is stored) and climbed the defense walls. Everything is dizzingly high being on top of a tower in addition to being on top of a mountain. David said to me more than once, just think of the pobrecitos (poor souls) who had to build the castle. I said that I think living in Marvao would be difficult and David reminded me that not too long ago, living anywhere was difficult. I answered, 'Yes, but I think Marvao might have been
Look out
The portal of the look out station just fit me (I am 5´4´´), I didn´t have to duck to go in. I quickly regreted going in when I realized the inside walls were coated with shiny black insects. The buggers were inside every tower. just a bit more difficult.'
David´s house is so new that it doesn´t have hot water yet. So, we drove down to Valéncia to take showers. Terésa´s family home is a huge house, '180 something years old' and just off the main square. The walls are much more than a meter think and solid stone. In the patio are a few orange trees and old animal pens. Because Valéncia is so much higher in elevation than Cáceres, Terésa spends most of the summer there.
I went to mass with Terésa on Sunday and her neighbor Marci had us, the priest and a few other people over to their tavern (right across the street from the church in San Pedro) for coffe. She said it was tradition to have the priest over after mass and she called it, 'Universidad Popular' the common person´s university. The priest couldn´t stay long as he had to go do mass at a convent in a neighboring village. He says mass at 5 different places every weekend as the congregations are too small to have their own priest.
¡Hasta luego!
Clair
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Chico
non-member comment
Hola Clarita!
Hola amiga! Como esta? Veo que esta pasando un buen tiempo en Espagna! Quiero muchisimo en su lugar! Que pasa un buen dia! Chico (catbirdman! HAHA!)