The Ghost Village’s Last Souls
A walk on the dark side of rural Portugal
Somewhere in the Cauldron mountains, on a hill surrounded by a hundred other hills, there is a settlement with a population of four.
Ruined houses lurch under the weight of lichen. Few have rooves. Electricity wires lope from pole to pole, supplying only two homes, and none have mains water. That comes from taps out in the stony streets; you just have to carry it home.
Rui lives in a one room shack at the far end of the village. He has a good head of hair for a man in his sixties, and keeps it dyed a shiny shade of black. His main occupation is drinking. His driving license long gone, each day he wends his wobbling way around the hills on an old bike to the café where the old men booze their way through the afternoons. He is here under the patronage of Alberto, the village elder, who owns most of the land.
Alberto has round face and twinkling eyes, tends an orchard in the sunshine and makes whirligigs to scare away birds. There was a time when I wanted to adopt him as my grandfather. He grew up in the times when the village was functional, populated, a strong collection of farms. But one by one everyone left for the city, for Faro or Lisbon, swapping rocky fields for grey apartment blocks and actual paying work. At some point in his 90 years he…
