Castanheira de Pêra

In the year 2000 the workcamps in Portugal only for Portuguese people were terminated, since that year only international workcamps exist in the Portuguese territory. It was in that year that i went to my 4th workcamp but my 1st international workcamp that took place in Castanheira de Pêra. It was the first time that i was with people from other countrys, there were people from France, Germany and Spain. The main problem of this camp, was that there were too many Portuguese, half of the campers were from Portugal. The work was not very hard, the main objective was to make an photo album with all the saints statues that existed near the village roads,this saints have the porpose to send the bad spirits away and bless the way. It was a very nice camp, i went to concerts, walked in the midle of the forest, went to Coimbra (the student capital of Portugal), but in the end i lost contact with all people from that camp.

This weekend after five year i was back to Castanheira de Pêra.
Castanheira is a small town that has around 3733 habitants( 2001 census), in the center of Portugal, two hours distance from Lisbon.


it's situated in the south side of the Lousã mountains, and has altitudes that may reach 1100-1200 altitude. The mountains are filled with trees, mainly eucaliptus and pine trees. The vilage souroundings have a very big variety of small water courses and where there are some river beaches.

This mountains have very tipical villages all made of stone.Unfurtunelly the majority of this villages are abandoned, mainly because of their remote location.

Now the Castanheira Town has a new water park where you have artificial waves(it's funny to see people so exited to see the waves). All the park was constructed inside the river basin. Next to the swimming pools the river flows to a lake. the lake porpouse is to allow diferent aquatic sports.


I am not very big fan of the park and i prefer going to the places like poço corga, a river beach. Near the river beach there is a very nice campsite own by a nice men from Netherlands that lives there for 10 years and speaks very bad portuguese.

Not very far from castanheira there is Santo António das Neves, a place where there are some old storage rooms where in the old time, people storaged ice to do icreams for the king

All this photos are not mine, because i still don't have a camera so i didn't
take any photos but still i wanted to share this place with you.

In the link http://www.cm-castanheiradepera.pt/
you can find more about this village and see nice photos like this ones. It's only in portuguese


I LEAVE IN 19 DAYS