Weather: Light rain to start, then mainly overcast with a couple of showers. Getting breezy.
I'd barely got a foot out of the door for this morning's run when I came back in for a jacket. The rain was so light that I hadn't heard it, but it was of the sort that gets you surprisingly wet.
Over breakfast it dried and brightened up, which was fortuitous, as I was determined to have a look around Serpa's old walled town and its castle whilst we were there.
We're not timing ourselves well this week. We hit Lousal yesterday, when the museum we wanted to visit was closed, and today we discovered that Serpa is generally closed on a Tuesday. It was thus a quiet place, but we still got to appreciate:
The aqueduct, added onto the top of the town walls late in the 17th century to provide water to the manor house:
The narrow cobbled streets of the old town:
The views from the castle walls:
As with most of Europe, they don't go in much for railings or health and safety in general. I shunned the staircase in the photo below in favour of one that wasn't quite so long, steep and uneven:
The thing that interested us the most about the castle was this substantial chunk of fallen masonary at the entrance:
Oh for an information sign telling us what it originally looked like and what had happened to have it end up like this! We got to see the damage from various angles (including from on top of the wall on the left in the snap above) and concluded that a tower that had fallen during the earthquake of 1755, with the lower piece on the right being the middle of the tower, and the upper bit on the right being the top of the tower, which now sits on its side. So interested were we that we visited the tiny archaeological museum inside of the castle, and then hunted out the tourist office in the hope of an answer, but apparently the town doesn't consider this interesting enough to mention. Wikipedia finally gave us the answer (which may or may not be true!) that a) we were indeed looking at a fallen tower; but b) it wasn't the earthquake that did it, but an explosion in the magazine store during the Spanish War of Succession.
Mick looked pleased with elevenses!
It didn't take us very long to see everything we felt there was of interest to us in Serpa, so onwards we came, via a quick stop at an Intermarche in Moura to use their bizarrely secure service point:
One has to go into the store to obtain (at no charge) the huge wooden keyfob and chain, bearing the keys for each of the doors to the different elements of the service point. I can, perhaps, understand locking the tap away, but a locked uPVC door on the toilet disposal point?!
It wasn't long before we were negotiating the killer speed humps (at least the roads were smooth today!) on our way back out of town, for the final 15-minute drive to the southern end of the largest reservoir in Europe.
Lunch (a rather late one) was first on the agenda on arrival, and if it hadn't been for the threatening colour of the sky and the accompanying squally winds, we would likely have then gone straight out for a look around. As it went, it was knocking on for 1630 by the time I concluded that as all bar one shower had missed us we may as well go for a little stroll across the dam. That we did - and only got a little damp as we caught the edge of the next shower.
This photo doesn't do justice to the scale of this substantial piece of engineering:
It's a nice spot where we're parked...
Bertie is the one on the far right
...but other than the visitor centre across the road, there's not much to do here. My hopes of some waterside walking paths have been dashed. It therefore seems likely that we'll be on the move again tomorrow.
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