Just when you thought you were getting the hang of the way Spaniards lisp their Cs, they go and change the language on you. More discreet than their more famous Catalan, Basque, and Galician cousins, speakers of Mañego in this hidden green valley have been ‘falaing’ (falar=hablar=to speak) their curious mix of Spanish, Latin, Gallego,…
Perched high above a patchwork of olive groves and cork forests, a holy mountain juts 758 meters (2486 feet) from the surrounding plain. It’s a sacred playground overlooking neighboring villages where naughty gods once used huge granite boulders as their croquet pieces, and left them scattered, forgetting to clean up after themselves. Over the centuries…
Around these parts the border is porous and exactly where Portuguese villages become Spanish is lost among the cork tree forests (and in today’s Europe so is the point). Sometimes the little white houses are fringed with blue sometimes yellow but walk through the immense walls and past the Visigothic church and into a bar and the confusion ends.…