Silence, Wolves and the Wild East: Hiking in Portugal’s Côa Valley
The flashlight flicks on and carvings appear out of the darkness. They are 20,000 years old. Engravings of ibex, horses and aurochs, drawn alone or in groups. A few are in movement, like ancient animations. Their crisp lines feel timeless.
I am here to walk as much as I can of Portugal’s Côa Valley Grand Route, staying in bed-and-breakfasts and trying to understand the changes that are drawing both wildlife and people back to one of the country’s most remote corners.
I began a week earlier, driving three hours inland from Porto — past crowds of tour buses and day-trippers in the wine region of Pinhão. Evening fell over the vines, and the lights flicked out one by one until the road wound dark and silent through the hills. I watched a stone marten cross the road, low and dark, satin fur.
My first stop is in the village of Vale da Senhora da Póvoa, where Samuel Ribeiro and Marta Simoes, young transplants from Lisbon, run a grocery store and a small nature guiding company. The couple is part of a small wave of people reversing a 50-year tide that has almost entirely emptied this region, as people fled in search of better economic opportunities. Their store, full of both basics and local artisanal products, is about community as much as commerce.
Marta packs me a picnic — crisp local bread, honey, sweet tomatoes in olive oil, plump cherries — and I set off to find the source of the river.
When I find it, the Côa River wells implausibly out of dry ground among oaks and pines, then runs north along the Spanish border. The area, called the Malcata, is a nature reserve of hills and steep valleys that was the last home to wild Iberian lynx in Portugal before they disappeared, and where many hope to see their return.
From my accommodation at Moinho do Maneio, I hike through stands of oak and strawberry trees. A roe deer barks in alarm. Lush ferns reach past my waist and dozens of yellow butterflies lift and flutter as I walk. An abandoned mill appears through the trees. I feel as if I have somehow stepped out of the present, out of Portugal, even out of Europe, and into an enchanted, parallel world.
It is very still. Only the sound of the stream and the birds.
I stop at a farm on the edge of the reserve. Huge dogs with spiked collars wait by the house. Their job is to protect livestock from the wolves that have crept back into this landscape as people have left.
Albano Alavedra, the owner of the farm, offers me a beer. We sit on the terrace under an ancient oak and talk about wolves.
“Wolves make good shepherds,” he says. And good shepherds pay attention to the land, which helps both his animals and the landscape. Where there are wolves, there is no excess of anything, he says. “It is the human who throws it out of balance.”
I ask Mr. Alavedra, who grew up here, why he stayed when so many left. “My mother wanted me to get a degree,” he smiles. But his passion, he says, has always been for farming and for nature. “Only those who really liked it, stayed,” he says. “We are the only ones here now.”
Farther north, the trail crosses a medieval bridge, once the border with Spain. I stop in the evening light as martins and swallows swoop in the gloaming.
In the village of Vilar Maior, Bárbara Cardoso, an engineer and beekeeper, is visiting her elderly mother, Maria Cândida, who runs a bed-and-breakfast in their old family home. Ms. Cardoso welcomes me in and, in the morning, shows me her bees. “I like their determination,” she says. It feels like a metaphor for the whole landscape.
Dinner at the bed-and-breakfast is three courses of local cheese and honey, chickpea stew, ripe tomatoes in salt and olive oil, local wine, then dessert and several glasses of Maria Cândida’s homemade liqueur. I’m chided for not having thirds. We lack a common language, so I can only mime that I’m about to burst. She mimes back that I should eat more, then run uphill to the castle — built to defend the region against Spain. I take her advice, heading up the cobblestone streets. Each stone of the fortress is carved with the symbol of the man who made it, which is apparently how your pay was calculated if you were a stonemason in 13th-century Portugal.
Rewilding Portugal, a nonprofit conservation organization, manages tracts of land in the valley as part of an ambitious plan to accelerate the rewilding already underway. This includes reintroducing species like Sorraia horses, a local breed, and tauros, a specially bred bovine — a modern attempt to recreate the ancient and extinct aurochs, which once roamed across Europe.
Near Vilar Maior, I look for Sorraia horses. Merlin, the bird app on my phone, identifies the songs of 38 different species.
I sit on a granite boulder for breakfast. Sheep cheese on crunchy bread. The sun just cresting the ridge behind me and pushing the morning chill from the air in one hot breath. It is very still, just as it has been for days. There are signs of people everywhere — roads, stone barns, crumbling walls. But I see no one.
I catch movement in the tall grass. Something big. Not a horse. More like a dog. It is an odd feeling to want something to be a wolf while also feeling a chill of unease.
They tell stories about wolves here. That wolves steal the children, leaving only their shoes. They tell old stories, and new ones too. That environmentalists are sneaking wolves into the towns and releasing them at night. None is true.
I look again, and a family of boar snuffle out of the brush, in search of their own breakfast. There goes my wolf story.
When I find horses, it is unexpected. They trot down the path, eyeing me uncertainly, then prance away among the wildflowers, sleek and gray. A booted eagle looks sharply down from her nest as storks and buzzards soar overhead.
Farther north, I arrive at a bend in the river as evening falls and swim in the cool water. Afterward, a pair of otters appear, silky and dark in the fading light. Uphill, in the garden of Côa Honeycomb, my hotel, a cat twists around my feet. Not quite a lynx.
Fernando Romão, who runs Wildlife Portugal, a nature guiding company, takes me to look for tauros in the morning. Originally from Lisbon, Mr. Romão moved here and became obsessed with the region’s biodiversity. He is a gold mine of information about everything from rare plants to insects and wildlife, including a water snake — as richly patterned as a Persian carpet — that he points out in a stream.
We pass an ancient “wolf trap,” evidence of the region’s long and complex history with predators. (A sacrificial lamb would be left inside the stone enclosure as bait to trap.) We cut across granite boulders, brambles scratching at our legs and arms, the Côa far below.
I ask about tourism. There isn’t much, he says. People come to see birds and wildlife. Some have a hard time sleeping because they’re unaccustomed to so much silence, he says.
We round a bend and come suddenly upon a herd of tauros. They’re enormous, some weighing more than 2,000 pounds, wild and intimidating with their long horns. Together with Sorraia horses, tauros are transforming the landscape, eating and stamping and allowing oak forests — cleared for agriculture — to return. Conservationists hope that ibex and lynx will soon join them.
Later, Conceição Matos and her husband show me their farm, with accommodation downstairs and her stately family home above. Every room tells a story. One room, she tells me, was hand-painted by a French soldier who stayed during the Napoleonic wars. We descend stone steps into fields where last summer’s fires burned right up to the walls. I’m invited to dinner on the terrace. Bread and olive oil infused with thyme and rosemary from the fields, and “garden sardines” — vegetables battered and cooked as fish would be on the coast. Crisp white wine and water with a hint of fresh vervain.
Even more than the fires, Ms. Matos tells me their challenge is finding people to work. “I still believe a lot of people will come back,” she says, looking out over the cherry trees and the fields that her family has farmed for generations.
At last, the Côa nears the Douro River, where the trail ends beside the Côa Museum, overlooking the vineyards. As I get closer, my hopes of seeing a lynx or a wolf fade, but I still look and listen for howls under the waning moon.
Just south, the trail climbs to avoid a UNESCO World Heritage area that protects prehistoric rock art along the riverbank, accessible only with a guide. As the sun sets, I meet Marco Ferraz, who has run cultural and nature tours here for years and who tells me the best time to visit is at dusk.
As we approach the river, he tells me how this region was once set to be flooded for a dam, and that the discovery of prehistoric engravings became a national election issue. António Guterres, now the United Nations Secretary General, lobbied to save them while running for prime minister, and won.
We walk along the riverbank in darkness. The Côa is unseen but roaring, fed by the many tributaries I’ve crossed since that humble spring in the hills.
When the engravings appear in the flashlight, I sit in awe. Drawings of the deep past, but also now — as wildlife returns to the valley — of the present.
