The Minho and Peneda-Gerês, from Portugal’s cradle to its granite granaries

Between the Gerês mountains and the Minho river

North-west Portugal is green because it rains: around three metres of water a year on the summits of the Gerês. The houses are built of granite, and the vines climb on trellises above the maize. The loop starts in Braga and soon leaves the towns behind for the mountains.

In Peneda-Gerês park, the roads are narrow and full of bends. Cows and garranos, half-wild horses, wander freely along them. You stop by a reservoir, at a stone bridge or in a shepherds’ village.

From the village of Castro Laboreiro, the road drops down to the Minho, the river that separates Portugal from Galicia and gives the region its name. You follow it from Monção to Caminha, past the ramparts of Valença, to the Atlantic. Viana do Castelo and Ponte de Lima then lead back to Braga.

Twenty minutes from Guimarães, the Citânia de Briteiros lays out the low round walls of more than a hundred and fifty Iron Age houses.

Braga, founded by the Romans as Bracara Augusta, is the city of archbishops. Its cathedral, consecrated in 1089, is older than the kingdom itself. A saying sums the city up: Lisbon plays, Porto works, Braga prays. To the east, Bom Jesus do Monte, a World Heritage Site since 2019, climbs its hill by a zigzagging Baroque staircase. Its funicular of 1882 runs on a water counterweight: it is the oldest of its kind still in service in the world.

The country’s only national park

Created in 1971, Peneda-Gerês National Park and the Serra do Xurés, in Galicia, together form a cross-border biosphere reserve. In the Mata da Albergaria, an old oak wood, you can still find the milestones of the Geira, the Roman road from Braga to Astorga. In the early 1970s, the Vilarinho das Furnas dam drowned a village where everything was decided in common. In dry years, its walls rise above the water again.

In the villages, the espigueiros, stone granaries on stilts topped with a cross, protect the maize from damp and rodents. At Soajo, twenty-four crowd onto a single slab of rock; at Lindoso, some sixty stand in rows below the castle. Here, granite does every job, even guarding the maize. At Sistelo, nicknamed ‘Portugal’s little Tibet’, the terraces became in 2018 the first rural landscape to be listed as a national monument.

What not to miss

1. 1The Ponte da MisarelaA stone arch over the Rabagão which, legend has it, the Devil built.
2. 2Pitões das JúniasA village of the Barroso at more than 1,000 metres and, within walking distance, a ruined Cistercian monastery.
3. 3The Peneda sanctuaryA staircase of chapels at the foot of a vast wall of granite.
4. 4The fortress of ValençaBastioned ramparts above the Minho, facing the Galician town of Tui.
5. 5Viana do CasteloThe basilica of Santa Luzia and, on the quayside, the Gil Eannes, hospital ship to the cod-fishing fleet, built here in 1955.
6. 6The bridge at Ponte de LimaRoman legionaries, it is said, dared not cross the Lima, which they took for the Lethe, the river of forgetfulness.

The Minho and Peneda-Gerês in pictures

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The Ponte da Misarela and its waterfall, among the granite boulders of the Rabagão.

The Minho’s table

The Minho’s wine is vinho verde, a young wine, lively and fresh. At Monção and Melgaço it is made from Alvarinho, the region’s most celebrated grape.

First comes caldo verde, a kale soup. Then come rojões, fried pork, or the arroz de sarrabulho of Ponte de Lima, a rice cooked with pig’s blood. When the lamprey swims up the river, it is cooked with rice. In Braga, the pudim Abade de Priscos combines port with pork fat.