Weather: Very wet and very windy morning, brightening and wind gradually lessening this afternoon.
With the wind rocking Bertie and lashing the rain into his flanks this morning, there was a limited inclination to do much. We did start to get ready for a walk across the road to the Information Centre at just after 10am, but we'd not even got our shoes on before another squall hit and we decided that coffee was a better idea. An hour later we tried again, and only got slightly wet as we discovered that the Information Centre is now a closed up building with rotting windows and doors.
Having nothing much to do nearby was balanced out by feeling disinclined to do anything in that weather, so the decision was made to stay put. I finished my latest bit of knitting...
This one's for me.
...and cast on a jumper. It was just as I'd finished casting on (and before I'd checked my count) that a sudden rethink was had. Great chunks of blue sky had appeared and, even though it was still windy, there was no sign of rain nearby, so we decided to move on.
We could have gone to either of our next two intended stopping points, but opted for Luz.
We already knew a little of the background of the village when we arrived but this afternoon's visit to the Museum told us more.
Until 2002 the village of Luz (363 inhabitants at the time) was located 3km from where it is now. It's previous location is now underwater and with the buildings having been demolished before it was flooded, there's no chance of the church tower ever being seen in periods of drought.
The new village of Luz is not a replica of the original, although the street layout is largely the same. The new houses were built and the residents moved into homes that, save for the few missing streets, gave the same neighbours as they'd had previously. That must have lessened the blow of having to move, but the documentary we watched on the subject featured mainly folk well into retirement age, many of whom had lived in Luz their entire lives, for whom the move was clearly a big wrench (even if for the greater good of providing irrigation water for the entire region). As the one older chap said: It's all very well giving him a new house, but he also had an allotment and mature fruit trees and even if he acquired land to plant more trees, at his age he wouldn't get to see them fruit.
The museum isn't very big, so we didn't expect it to take us long to look around. In fact, it was because of its small size that we decided to visit when we happened to be passing mid-afternoon today, rather than keeping with the original plan of going tomorrow. What we hadn't reckoned on was the documentary. I didn't time it, but it wasn't the usual 10-15 minute sort of feature one usually finds in a museum. It was, however, so interesting that it held us there until three minutes before the museum's closing time, when we thought we ought to leave.
One thing that struck me during all of this is that, as far as any information we've seen has told us, Luz was the only village to be submerged in the making of the reservoir, which, if true, is quite incredible when you consider the water covers an area of 250 square kilometres.
We did form some initial opinions on the appearance of the new village today, but we did only see a little of it. We'll explore further tomorrow and report back...
(Today's road-related aside: It seems to us that the roads going through towns and villages are in a worse state than the rural stretches (and some of those are bad). Is this a matter of where the funding comes from, we wonder - local authority versus national roads agency? Today on a section of cobbles through one town we agreed that the cobbles were smoother than the tarmac we had just left. The UK's roads are in a pretty bad state, and Belgium's rival those of the UK, but I don't think we've yet (in Western Europe) come across anywhere with so much road in such a state of uneveness as Portugal.)
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