City of Flintstones in Portugal

The ancient giants played with pebbles, like a ball. And when the game got tired, they disappeared. When people came here, they built a village around the boulders: blocks often serve as walls, or even roofs of their houses.

The tiny town of Monsanto in the wilderness of the mountainous part of the country is called the most Portuguese in all of Portugal. And this is the official title. Giant boulders are scattered across the entire surface of the Holy Mountain - as monte santo translates.

The streets of Monsanto looked exactly the same, not even a hundred, but three hundred years ago. There was electricity and running water, they successfully and almost imperceptibly fit into the stone history of the village.

This is a cool place, look soon!

Lumps of stone begin at the foot of the village. It’s scary to look at them, not like parking a car nearby!

When you climb a small serpentine, you find yourself in the very center of Monsanto, in the square with the church. You look and see nothing surprising. Ordinary portuguese village! Where are the promised miracles?

They begin almost immediately, you just have to climb up any of the steep streets that lead from the square.

The walls of the houses are built of the same material as the boulders themselves. This is granite. Sometimes it is impossible to distinguish where nature ends and the work of human hands begins.

Cars leave everything below, and some of them are locals. About ten for the whole village. Because driving along such streets is a dubious pleasure, and there is nowhere to park. This truck brought groceries to a local store, and then with great difficulty descended backwards. It took the driver about half an hour: to go back three hundred meters.

Almost one pensioner lives in the city.

And here lives the most terrible dog in the world!

Tourists get to the village, I won’t lie that my story is exclusive. You can easily find other reports from Monsanto online, usually translations of foreign articles. But still it’s not easy to get here, with public transport it’s tight, sightseeing buses do not go. So a place for independent tourists. This photo is canonical, everyone does it. And then they sign it as "the Flintstones village."

Here the stone acts as a roof, the house is built around. Yes, I had a toilet wall in the house where I lived, was a huge boulder!

City gate.

A lot of abandoned houses. As I already wrote, mostly old people live here, and their children and grandchildren, who have gone somewhere, seem to have no use for a house in a mountain village.

Here are the buildings and fall apart from time to time.

And to demolish them and build others in place is strictly prohibited. In general, there can be no changes in the city! But recently, a local mobile operator committed an insidious crime: he installed his antenna on the top of the mountain. Now residents have Internet and communication, but they are ready to cut the antenna to hell, and for now they are collecting signatures on a petition that this blasphemy should be stopped. So they told me: “Write there on the Internet that the antenna prevents you from taking pictures of our beautiful village!”

The village ends abruptly. Here is the last house around the bend, several large stones and a path that leads even higher up the mountain.

I saw this door hidden in one of the stones. I immediately remembered the series Lost ("Lost").

You go out into the clearing, and there is a medieval castle. I already said that in Portugal there is a castle on every mountain? I’m just ignoring them, I’ve become boring, but I climbed a mountain here, since I’ve already reached it.

Kinds. Something reminiscent of Bashkiria. All regions with low mountains remind me of Bashkiria :)

On the way there are several more ruins and buildings. Apparently, the city used to be higher, but everyone was tired of climbing so far.

Forty minutes of unhurried walk - and here I am upstairs, I go into the castle. Exhaled, but satisfied.

At the very top is a huge kilometer post. I do not know what it means. And in the distance you can see the same ill-fated antenna, which grandfathers go to cut down on one clear moonlit night.

Once upon a time, brave princes and beautiful princesses lived in this castle. For nine centuries, here what just did not happen! There were Romans, even Arabs. And now only the wind is talking to these walls. And sometimes Chinese tourists poop.

But what kinds!

Zoom Zoom!

I regret that there was little time to study Monsanto as it happens. I walked around all the streets for those half days that I spent in the town. But this is not enough. It could have been an excellent report on the locals. Unfortunately, the language barrier is a serious problem in Portugal. Therefore, what happened is what happened. But while Monsanto is actually the coolest place I've ever seen in this country!