30 September 2022 - A Guarda, and relax...
Miles driven today = 29
Total Miles to date = 1,831
We've not driven many miles today but those that we have covered have been among the most exciting we've done on this trip. From Baiona we took the PO552 which hugs the rugged, rocky and largely undeveloped coastline south through Oia and on to A Guarda.
The town is overlooked by the the 341 metre high Mount Santa Trega, towards the top of which lies the main attraction for coming to this border town. We drove half way up the hill to a ticket booth and paid our €5.50 fee to pass. From there on the road became a succession of tight hairpins until we reached a completely empty car park near the top with a rather derelict looking church.
Christians have been here since the 4th Century AD but it was the residents of the Santa Trega settlement who had been here as much as 800 years previously who left a much more impressive mark on the landscape.
Much like the smaller settlement we saw the other day at Barona, the buildings are predominantly oval in shape.
They appear to be randomly spaced but were in fact organised into small neighbourhoods connected by narrow streets and drainage channels.
A couple of the buildings have been reconstructed with their thatched roofs and fire hearths.
The buildings would have been plastered and painted in reds, blues and white. The door jambs and lintels would also have been decorated.
It is thought that at its peak, between 3,000 and 5,000 people would have lived here. The settlement extended to an area of 20 hectares.
From their vantage point at the top of the hill the residents of Santa Trega would have had total control of the shipping trade along the Atlantic coast. Nowadays there are great views over the town of A Guarda.
There are also fantastic views of the Mino River estuary which forms the northern border between Spain and Portugal. Yup that's Portugal over there. We'll be there very soon.
But before we cross the river into Portugal we decided it was time to take our foot off the gas again for a couple of days and sort out some humdrum van admin stuff. We dropped down from the mountain and pulled in to Camping Santa Tecla. It's not an ACSI approved site but they still gave us a discount when we flashed our card so we have hook up and WiFi for €23 a night.
We got the bikes out again this afternoon. There is a path of sorts which roughly follows the estuary and then a much better one which follows the coast round to the port in A Guarda. Where river and Ocean meet there is an island Fort belonging to Portugal, the Forte da Insua.
As we cycled through a small wooded area we noticed that a lot of the trees had strange patterns painted on their bark. I thought initially they were aboriginal designs but it seems they were in fact recreations of petroglyphs found on Mount Santa Trega. There were points marked on the boardwalk where you can stand to see the partial designs on several trees aligned to make a complete pattern.
The Romans used this area extensively for salt pans. A small area has been exposed and restored to show how this was done.
A Guarda itself is based around the port with the town built into the steep hillside surrounding it. Most of the buildings are modern and somewhat blocky in design but I thought they looked great painted in such a variety of colours.
We sat in the sunshine and enjoyed a well earned beer before retracing our tracks back around the mountain.
This evening we finally got round to testing our Cadac barbecue with the Sea Bream we bought in Pontevedre Market yesterday. I'm pleased to advise it was a roaring success, cooked to absolute perfection. We'll have to remember though that 30cm is the maximum length for anything else we might buy to go on it. Even with its tail trimmed, the bream just barely fitted under the lid.
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