Helen and Peter in Portugal

In October the chestnuts start to fall (mind your head they are spiky buggers), but the whole village and beyond start collecting chestnuts, young and old alike, everyone is carrying buckets of them around.     As with all gluts, you do start to tire of them after having baked chestnuts the 4 th night running!   But we’ve been collecting with the best of them, as the proud owners of one of the best chestnut trees in the village, we’ve been out there every day clearing up, throwing some on the bonfire (which has smoked away for several days now) and hearing them pop, preparing 100s of them for freezing.   I even made a chestnut flour cake (recipe below if you want to try it). So, what better time to have a chestnut festival!    The village of Coentral hosts an annual chestnut festival, with music, dancing, food, drink and you guessed it...chestnuts.   Normally held inside due to poor weather, this year the sun shone and almost all the surroun...

Wednesday the 5 th October was not a great day for Castanheira de Pera,   a small fire started in the woods sometime in the early afternoon.   By 2pm it was a pretty big fire with 30 firemen (Bombeiros) and numerous fire trucks.     Coming home from a lunch with some friends, we got a phone call asking if we were OK.   Well, we’d seen the smoke from the road, but not realised it was happening so close to home.     The village was out watching the fire, it seemed under control.   No one was worried, everyone just calming saying how awful the fire was.     2 hours later the wind got up and blew the fire across the valley, on an on it went, along the top of the ridge through thousands of trees, covering miles and miles.     At 4pm the helicopter came over head, dropping tonnes of water on a hotspot just at the top of the hill. Through the binoculars we saw the Bombeiros run for their l...