Portugal's Schist Villages: 27 Stone Hamlets in the Hills

The schist villages of central Portugal are made of the hillside they stand on. Dark grey stone, slate roofs, streets barely wide enough for a donkey, everything built from whatever was nearest. Twenty years ago most of them were emptying out. Then a slow, careful restoration project brought some of them back, and now you can sleep in a village of thirty people and still find someone to cook you dinner.

Talasnal is the one people fall for first. You leave the car at the top and walk down into it, which immediately changes your mood, and the whole place opens under the Lousã hills with its roofs stepping down the slope. Candal and Casal Novo are close by and quieter. Further east, Piódão is the famous one, a hillside of slate houses with blue window frames that looks unreal in photographs and, unusually, also in person.

Go for the walking. Trails link the villages through chestnut and pine woods, most of them two or three hours, none of them technical. Along the way you pass river beaches, praias fluviais, where a stream has been dammed just enough to make a swimming pool with a stone edge. In summer they are the best thing in the region.

Evenings are simple. A small restaurant with six tables, chanfana or wild boar stew, a rough red wine, and then a level of darkness and silence that city people find slightly unnerving for the first hour and then never want to leave.

Come midweek if you can, book ahead because the guesthouses are tiny, and wear shoes with grip. Schist is beautiful and it is slippery when wet.