Road Trip 1 - Lamego, Provsende, Favios and Vinhais (Lamego,Provsende, and Favio ~ Portugal)

30 August 2022

Our cunning plan was to catch the train from Pinhao back to Regua de Peso and pick up our hire car there. This came unstuck when we found that the train got into  Regua at midday and, because this is Portugal, everything shuts up shop from midday to at least 2:30 in the afternoon. This left us with the option of catching the 8:00am train (and forgo our bacon and eggs breakfast provided by the accommodation) or get a taxi. Taxi it was. 

Peso de Regu is a bustling little town and we spent as long as it took to pick up our car and get out of there. 

As mentioned before we did a trip up the Duoro Valley by train and had lunch somewhere. Well sfe to say we have no idea where that was as nothing at looks familiar- will need to dig up some old photoes when we get back.

First stop from Peso was a small village called Lamego. Choose this as it was only 10km drive from Peso and meant to be quite pretty and would give e Sally a chance to get familiar with the car given it was diesel with left hand drive and had no backing camera or sensors at all.

In hindsight Lamego may not have been the best choice as they were in the preparations for some celebrations of some sort (start of wine harvesting I think) and a bit busier than normal and the big car pack was filled with fairground gear.

The upside of the upcoming celebrations was numerous food, drink and productstalls. Stalls which seemed to specialise is smoked meats. Picked up a v nice chourico sausage and sliced ham. Sliced ham here is pretty much by default what Italians would call prosciutto.

At the end of a v long town square lies steps (alot of steps) up to Igreja de Nossa Senhora dos Remédios.

 Made it about 20% of the way up before stopping to take a few photoes and flagging it away. 

From there our route tooks us through the very sleepy villages of Provsende and Favios. Provsende in its day was once the seat of the Municipality and boasts multi large manor houses. Nowadays it's a very quite little wine town.

Favios is another v sleepy wine producing town which us famous for bread, so much so that it has a large museum dedicated to bread and it's history in this region.  Have to say that scenery is stunning but does come at a price as driving along some incredibly windy and steep roads.

Our destination for the day was in Vinhais and was in quite a rural location  a couple of km outside the village centre.  A massive solid stone building was 1/2 metre thick walls.

And the key to the front door was for the most complex lock mechanism I have ever seen. To break in you would have to pick 4 Yale locks simultaneously.

Plans are to stay here a few days, do a bit of exploring before heading west.