PR1Pinheiro Crags

A trail along the border

This route walks along the border. It is not a trail with views towards Spain — it is a trail that follows the line separating the two countries, and that line is visible: in the walls, in the marks carved into the rocks, and in the stone boundary posts with a "P" on one side and an "E" on the other. Here the border is not a line on a map; it is something one can touch.

Centuries of wars, smuggling and good neighbourliness cease to be told history and become ground underfoot. At each small summit crossed, a new landscape opens up, and a good part of it is already Spain.

Pinheiro Novo, the schist village

The route is circular and begins and ends in Pinheiro Novo, a village in the Montesinho Natural Park where the walls are stone and the roofs are slate schist slabs. The trail passes through the village streets, and it is worth taking them slowly, as the village repays the visit. The cobbled path ends at the leisure area, with a swimming pool open in summer, and from that point the way is unsurfaced track.

The mountain

A few hundred metres beyond the last houses, the upland is entirely one's own: gorse, granite and a silence that has almost ceased to exist. The gradients are gentle throughout, and along the way there are two fresh-water springs — one of them the Marta’s Pen spring — where one can catch one's breath without hurry.

The Penedo Pé de Meda

Halfway along the route, roughly six kilometres from the village on either side, lies the place that stays in the memory: a granite boulder with a schist lean-to shelter built against it, serving at once as a shepherd's refuge and a border marker, as the inscription carved into the stone attests. Beside it a spring runs, and no one can say whether the water is Portuguese or Spanish.

Crags and dolmens

Between the Pé de Meda Crag and the village, the path passes by named rock formations — the Ringing Crag and the Crosses Crag — and by dolmens thousands of years old, with Pinheiro Novo appearing below. One arrives with the feeling of having walked through two countries without ever leaving the trail, and with a wish to see what lies on the other side of the boundary posts. Those who wish to continue exploring the border will find, a few kilometres away, the PR2 · Between the Mente and the Rabaçal, where the frontier is a river.