(Portugal)…I decided to get off the main E-4 motorway in northern Portugal at the town of Mirandela. There was no rhyme or reason for this, just that I had become bored, even though as far as motorways go, Portugal has to have some of the world’s emptiest. I was heading into the lonely region of Tras-os-Montes, all those esses pronounced with drawn-out esh sounds. I took a lonely road, and then I took a lonelier one and found myself in a space of a short time in two villages not even on my map. The first was named Soeima, the second Gebelim. There is little information to be found on them, other than the first has a population of 180, the second, 259, and that the name of Gebelim derives from an Arab word jabalain, which means “between two mountains.” The village’s crest was wonderful, two intercutting mountains and a black boar beneath two olive sprigs. A Roman bridge is in the area, and its church is dedicated to St. Martin.
It did feel that this region hugging the inside of the Spanish border was twice removed. Firstly, it is in Portugal, not Spain; secondly, it is difficult to get to if you do decided to make it to Portugal, as inevitably one first goes to either Porto or Lisbon. This is a realm where bear and wolves still exist and the locals play a form of bagpipe, together with their cousins in the Spanish province of Galicia to the north, called a gaita, played by a bagpiper called a gateiro and made from the wood of fruit trees: apple, cherry and olives.
The mountains I was passing through had the name of the Serra de Bornes, which added to the sense of the imposing country I was in. I strolled around both Soeima (the subject of the photograph above) and Gebelim. This is the land that tourists want to see—stubble-chinned ancients trying to pull stubborn mules off hay carts parked beside stuttering fountains and widows dressed in black shawls and headscarves tapping across cobblestone lanes with canes. 
A considerably larger town was Mogadouro, which has both a castle and a church and a name suggesting I was nearing the area’s famous wine-producing valley. When Mogadouro first got its start, the Douro River was a narrow river with occasional rapids. Today, it has changed dramatically, with heavily terraced vineyards and a series of dams that flooded the valley and allow pleasure craft on wine-tasting adventures access all the way into Spain and its Duero River (same river, different spelling). After a very comfortable night at the new Aquapura Douro Valley hotel (www.aquapurahotels.com/douro), I went back to my idea of remoteness and visited two monasteries a little farther west, in the villages of São João do Tarouca and Salzedas.
To reach the first I went through another little village called Mondim, where nearly every house is undergoing renovation. This is because the wife of the most successful Portuguese banker is from there, and together they practically brought the village. São João lacks the money but is blessed in other ways. Its cathedral with ruined Cistercian monastery (although some priests do live adjacent) dating to 1113 boasts a nationally famous painting of St. Peter by Gaspar Vaz, a student of Grão Vasco, also known as Vasco Fernandes. A very similar painting hangs in a museum in nearby Viseu. It is noteworthy for its depiction of Portugal’s then king dressed in pontifical purple, his face made to resemble a peasant, with rough features and a bold statement that where the regal power lays so does the religious.
I almost tripped over the tomb of Pedro Afonso, who as well as being the Count of Barcelos (where the country’s famous painted roosters are carved in tribute to the legend of an accused murderer being spared at the eleventh hour) was also the illegitimate son of the country’s King Dinis and the author of a work on the old enemy Spain entitled Crónica Geral de Espanha de 1344. I like the idea of history books dedicated to just one year and written by someone not from the country chronicled. I think this should be encouraged. Have the history of, say, Canada chronicled by someone from Swaziland or Papua New Guinea, who may or may not have been there. Portugal’s noble laureate in literature, José Saramago, came here and wrote in his travel book on the country, “In spite of which, the traveler knows he has never been here before, knows he has never visited São João de Tarouca, has never crossed this tiny bridge, never seen these hollowed-out grassy riverbanks or the ruined building in front of him, or the arches of the aqueduct (and now, as he writes, he is not sure he has seen them this time either), this short incline leading firstly up to the church door, then down again to the town.” On the way to the second monastery, I stopped in Ucanha, which has a relatively steeply arched bridge dating to the 12th century that crosses the River Barosa.
Part of the bridge has a stone roof under which is a long line of stone seating where monks from the monastery in Salzedas used to sit and collect tolls from travellers. In the church in Salzedas the wooden pews where the priests lined up also had seating, ingenious wooden protuberances that would allow the priests to spread out their cassocks over so it still appeared as though they stood throughout the long masses. The monastery at Salzedas is more fascinating and crumbling than the one in São João and like so many times experienced by Saramago, I, too, had to search for the villager who had the responsibility of holding the key.
When he arrived, it solved one of my long-standing questions as I have travelled around Iberia—where do all the old men who stand around outside cafés and churches comes from? Well, here was living proof that there is a steady stream of up-and-comers biding their time to take the place of the nonagenarians. He was pleasant, and as the heavy wooden door creaked open, we stepped into a musty quadrant of chipped stone, invading plants and broken paving slabs. It dates to 1168. Supposedly, there is a renovation project under way, has been since 10 years ago, it’s just that no one has got around to doing anything yet. An English couple owned one room off the quadrant, I was told. There was nothing special about the room, any more so than the calm, decayed wonder of all of it, so I asked why they—anyone—would want to own this particular spot. The guide had no answers, and then it turned out that the owners’ family came to Portugal in 1752.
It is true that many of the grand port- and wine-producing families of the area (if the room is owned by one of these) originated in England, and the Netherlands, and tend to marry to members of other vintners, but it seemed odd yet magnificent that they would be described as English when there would be in most probability little difference between them and anyone else in the area. Salzedas also has a crumbling Jewish quarter. It is small, three or four minuscule alleys and a heap of rooms piled on top of one another. The sewage system smelt as it would have done—or worse—than when the monastery was built. Only one small flat looked as if though it had had some attention. When you stepped out of the quarter back into the square in front of the church, the light was blinding.

(Italy/Portugal)...I have never felt much moved to adopt religion, but I have always enjoyed visiting religious sites. Not churches, cathedrals, temples, etc. per se (in fact, I’ve become a little immune to such sights now, in the same way that I rarely want to visit large city museums) but more rather ruined monasteries and castles established by strange religious orders. Luckily, there are many of these, be they established by the Saracens, the Knights Templar, the Rosicrucians, the Jesuits, even the Christadelphians, a group that believes the literal word of the Bible.
There was a small church of theirs, nothing less than someone’s house, around the road from where I grew up in northwest Kent, and I always considered it slightly scary. This most probably was because it was not normal, in that it was not the “normal” church, not the “normal” thing people did and not the “normal “ thing people believed in or would talk about. Tomar is a large town on the banks of the small River Nabão in central Portugal. Here there is a large, impressive Knights Templar castle based on the Temple of the Dome of the Rock of Jerusalem. Perched high on the hill overlooking the whole plain, the castle was constructed in 1160 by Gualdim Pais, grand master of the Order of the Knights Templar.
When Philip the Fair of France sponsored a papal bull outlawing the Templars, many of the order hastily fled to the extremities of Europe, including the British Isles and Portugal. The Tomar castle served as one of their retreats, although this branch was dissolved seven years later following another bull from Pope Clement V. Then, as now, the real reason for such a move was money. In Portugal, the Ordo de Cristo replaced the order.
The Portuguese king Dom Dinis championed the new group, and Henry the Navigator was for some time the head of it. The sails of the Portuguese ships of discovery that reached India and the Far East displayed a red cross against a white background — the emblem of both the Knights Templar and, perhaps not coincidentally, the flag of England. The Ordo de Cristo declined in the 16th century and was abolished altogether in 1834.
It was a well-kept ruin when I visited and enjoyed its main cloister, which hosted the 1581 coronation of Philip II of Spain, who succeeded to the Portuguese throne following the death of the Portuguese king Sebastiano I. The walk that leads around the hill to the castle gives an impressive sense of the castle's isolation and power, its courtyard displaying pale raked sand, artistically arranged flowerbeds and wonderfully designed metal contraptions for tying horses to. Immediately inside the main door is a high 16-sided altar, where it was alleged the Templars celebrated mass on horseback. A short car journey from Tomar is the famous pilgrimage site of Fátima, where three children, Lucia dos Santos and her cousins Francisco and Jacinta Marco, saw an apparition of the Virgin Mary on May 13, 1917, whilst tending sheep. The area is actually named after a 12th-century Moorish princess and was sacred to the Islamic people who at one time inhabited this area. Now all the site is concrete and tacky souvenir stands.
Tomar and Fátima could not be any different if they tried. I also enjoyed Assisi in Italy. I had stayed in Perugia overnight and caught a very early train after walking downhill from Perugia’s centre to its lonely station. Assisi also has a station a long way from town. Famous for being the home of St. Francis, the town retains a feeling of tranquility, most visitors staying on the bottom level that leads to the cathedral rather than walking up its steep slopes.
My favourite religious site there — and it is merely a church, not ruined in any way — was the quiet church of San Stefano, a 13th century gem on a zigzag lane just off Via San Paolo. Apparently, when St. Francis died on October 3, 1226, its bells rang out despite the absence of bell-ringers. On any day one visits, the place will always nearly be empty of people. The old man in the photograph operated a very colourful street organ. People dropped pennies in a basket for him.

(Portugal)...It was to no real surprise when England went out of the World Cup on penalty kicks. We simply cannot take them; I imagine the psychological weight of all those previous penalty-kick hiccups is forward in the English strikers' minds when they step up to shoot. When the game against Portugal went to its dreaded and unsatisfying conclusion, we England supporters knew our time was up, despite Portugal doing its best to miss two of its own spot kicks. Four days later, and Portugal are out, too, which is the first time in World Cup history in which the team that defeated England did not go all the way to the winners' podium. Italy is the team we are supporting now. It is just coincidence that I started reading José Saramago's Journey to Portugal (Viagem a Portugal) this week. It is excellent. I have been to Portugal twice, and as I read I am eagerly awaiting Saramago (http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1998/) to go to some of the places that I have been to in that beautiful country.
I travelled there first in 1990, the year Viagem a Portugal was published in Portugal, so I am assuming that the Nobel Laureate went on his own trek around the country in 1988 or 1989. I was following in his footsteps, which I feel quite warm about. Here is a passage from the book's English translation published in 2000: "In front of [Saramago] lies Mire de Tibães, an old Benedictine monastery, and an imposing edifice dwarfing the surrounding countryside, visible from many miles away. Only monks are capable of such excesses. The monastery is an utterly dejected ruin. When the traveller went into the first cloister, he assumed that restoration might be in progress. Disappointment swiftly set in: building there was, but only that connected with the families living in the monastery's dependencies and, going from bad to worse, it always seemed to rain everywhere but in their improvised homes. As far as he can tell, he does the rounds of the cold and labyrinthine corridors, where blackened portraits still hang on the walls, coated with wood-dust, the whole also covered with the smell of mould, an irrecoverable death. The traveller entered the church in low spirits: it's a giant ship, its vault a block of segmented stone. The scale is abundantly ample and rich, as ever."
I found Mire de Tibães in the same manner Saramago did, after visiting the impressive, huge church of Bom Jesus in Braga, where the night before camped hill on a hill I had a perfect view of Braga, the local football team lose 3-4 to fellow Portuguese side Setúbal. Bom Jesus' most impressive attribute was its grand outdoor staircase in which the many individual staircases that make up the whole criss-cross each other in a mathematical conundrum that repeatedly tricks the eye.
Back to Mire de Tibães, I also found it in much the state Saramago did, but I also found it wonderful. There was no entrance fee, and the floorboards everywhere creaked under one's feet. A heavy wooden door, scuffed and punctured with heavy metal studs, led to an inner courtyard with tatty art left open to the elements. I could hear voices everywhere, but I could not see anyone, a mystery that I thoroughly enjoyed.
At the end of the first side of the cloister I walked along was a stairway that led down to a small chapel in which I sat hearing those same voices, but still not seeing anyone. A door on the other side of the stairway that contained the inner door that led to the chapel had a large keyhole that espied the monastery's gardens. I looked through and there was my first sighting of a person all morning, a monk hoeing an allotment. Altogether a majestic place, and it was with some alarm that I read shortly afterwards that the Portuguese government was considering turning the building into a pousada, upscale accommodations in historic properties similar to the Spanish chain of posadas.
I have no photographs of the monastery, so instead I post a shot of equally decrepit masonry taken in the central Portuguese town of Montemor-o-Novo on the road to the majestic town of Evora. The architect in charge of putting the drainage pipes in obviously cared not one hoot about staying true to the doorway's original architecture. Looking on the Internet, I see that the gardens surrounding the monastery won a prestigious award, the International Carlo Scarpa Prize for Gardens (http://www.fbsr.it/eng/pagine.php?s=&pg=104), in 1998, so improvements must have taken place, although not as many as would have resulted in an unfortunate hotel; indeed, photos taken this year show an admirable sprucing-up without the loss of the site's obvious character.
The award-giving jury mentioned in its address that the monastery contained a "vast estate with woods, orchards, vegetable and flower gardens, lakes and canals, buildings and stone sculptures, created by Benedictine monks on the slopes of the São Gens mountain towards the town of Mire de Tibães and the River Cávado, near the city of Braga in the region of Minho in the far north of Portugal."
As I left the monastery, I turned up a steep road, which soon ended. I got out of my car (at the time, a 1978 Austin Princess) and pushed open a dusty door that felt as though it had not been opened for centuries. On the other side was a site as equally as mysterious as my monastery, an almost indistinct path leading past fruit trees to a damaged series of steps by a whitewashed house and on which sat three children, who all stared at me before coming over to say hello. A mother appeared, but I could not speak a word of Portuguese, so the conversation was comprised of smiles and many instances of saying "sorry."