Month: September 2026

Monsanto: the Portuguese village among boulders

Monsanto is a village in eastern Portugal, hard against the Spanish border, built on a granite hill covered in enormous boulders. People did not move

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Peneda-Gerês: waterfalls, Roman road and villages

Peneda-Gerês is the only national park in Portugal, created in 1971 in the far north western corner of the country, hard against the Spanish border.

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Aldeias do Xisto: the schist villages of Portugal

Aldeias do Xisto are twenty seven villages in central Portugal, built entirely from slabs of schist quarried out of the hillside beside them. Almost all

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Costa Vicentina: wild beaches, surf and a natural park

Costa Vicentina is the stretch of south western Portuguese coast that nobody managed to build on. A natural park created in 1995 froze development along

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Oviedo or Gijon: which one suits you

They are twenty five kilometres apart, they belong to the same region and they dislike each other with a consistency that amuses everyone from outside.

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Playa de las Catedrales: planning around the tides

This is the one beach in Europe where the hour you arrive decides whether you see anything at all. Playa de las Catedrales has stone

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Picos de Europa: the best hiking trails

A limestone massif that rises to over 2,600 metres just twenty kilometres from the Atlantic, with deep gorges, glacial lakes and villages reached by funicular.

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Galicia: seafood, Celtic coast and pilgrims

The north west corner of Spain looks nothing like the Spain of the brochures: it rains all year, the landscape is green, people play the

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Dartmoor National Park: ponies, tors and legends

Dartmoor is a granite plateau of almost a thousand square kilometres in the middle of Devon, made a national park in 1951. It holds the

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