wet stone paths, vines overhead, river water at 64 degrees
Reserve an eight night Minho trip in northern Portugal
Eight nights in the Minho are held in two family manor houses, four on the Lima and four on the slope above the Minho river, with a rental car for the whole nine days, from $2,522 per person. May is the month it is set in because that is when the canopy closes over the granite vine posts and the river pools come up to a temperature a person can stay in. You drive it yourself, at whatever speed the roads and the growers allow.
Eight nights, from $2,522 per person.
Reserve an eight night Minho trip in northern Portugal and three things stand in your name: a room in a granite manor house half a mile outside Ponte de Lima for the first four nights, a room in a working vineyard house on the slope above the Minho river near Melgaço for the last four, and a small rental car from the morning you land to the morning you fly home. Nothing else in the week is fixed. The direct road between the two houses runs 50 miles, and you can make it take five hours.
May is the month the whole thing is built on, and the months on either side do not do the same job. The vines here grow overhead on granite posts about 7 feet up, in the old arrangement that leaves the ground beneath them free for maize and cabbage, and in the first two weeks of May the canopy closes over those posts almost while you watch. Flowering comes in the last week. Growers are in the rows daily through that stretch, tying shoots by hand, and it is the one part of the year when a man will put his knife down and walk you through a press house for an hour.
The second reason is water temperature. By the middle of May the Lima at Ponte de Lima reads about 64 degrees, and there are cut stone steps into it and a gravel bank to leave your things on. The Vez, 12 miles east at Arcos de Valdevez, comes straight off the mountain and sits nearer 57, which is a different proposition. In April both rivers are high and the color of strong tea. By late July the shallow pools have dropped and gone green.
When it goes
Weekly starts through May, and no other month
any week in one month: weekly starts through the month, and no other month works
What is reserved
An eight night Minho trip in northern Portugal
Eight nights, from $2,522 per person. Send a booking request
One double room held at each of two houses, four nights in each, a rental car collected and returned at the airport at Porto, and two dinners held at a house table.
The Minho is the wettest corner of Portugal and the greenest, and in the hills behind Melgaço the gauge reads over 100 inches in an ordinary year. Its vines are grown overhead rather than at waist height, on granite posts cut from the same rock as the field walls, because the ground underneath was wanted for maize and cabbage. The Minho river is the border with Spain, and from the terrace of the second house you are looking at Galicia across 200 yards of water. In the middle of May the sun is up around 6:35 and gone by 8:50, which gives 14 hours to spend and makes an eight o'clock dinner ordinary rather than late. Inland daytime temperatures sit between 70 and 76 degrees, with rain on about 10 days of the month, most of it after two in the afternoon. The Atlantic at the river mouth is around 57 degrees, colder than pools an hour inland, which catches people out every year.
Eight nights for two sharing one double room, four in the manor house on the Lima and four in the vineyard house above the Minho; breakfast at both houses, with bread from the village oven, hard sheep cheese and the house jam; dinner cooked by the family and served at one table at eight, one night at each house; a compact rental car for nine days with the toll transponder fitted and no mileage limit; the guided walk on the terraces above Sistelo, about four hours, with a guide who farms there; a morning with the grower in the vines and then in the winery building, with the wine tasted out of the tank; an hour among the granite grain stores at Soajo with somebody who can read the dates cut in the lintels; a swimming list drawn for your week, with water temperatures taken the week before you arrive and the parking noted for each pool; a road book with the slow roads marked and the two junctions where the GPS sends you the wrong way; written confirmation from both houses and from the car company before you owe anybody anything.
The flight to Portugal, which this office does not sell, about $850 to $1,400 round trip from the middle of the United States in May; fuel for the week, $90 to $140 for the driving described; road tolls if you use them in both directions, $25 to $40; lunches, $9 to $18 a head at a village place taking the dish of the day; the six dinners not cooked at the houses, $16 to $35 a head with wine; the river ferry into Galicia, about $2 on foot and $9 with the car, sold at the slip by the company that runs the crossing under its own licence; the hill funicular at Viana do Castelo, about $4 round trip; entry to the castle above Lindoso, about $2; bottles bought at the estate gate to carry home, $6 to $30 each; a second driver added to the rental agreement, about $65 for the week; insurance of any kind, which this office does not sell, arrange or advise on.
Everything in this week depends on one of you driving one lane roads between vineyard walls, with blind corners and about 200 miles across the eight days. The Sistelo walk climbs roughly 900 feet inside the first mile on laid stone that stays wet in the shade, and none of the good swimming sits at the bottom of a parking lot. The rivers are cold enough that some people get in once and never again. Ponte de Lima goes quiet by ten at night and Melgaço before that, so if you want somewhere to go after dinner, this is the wrong week.
The two houses, and the 50 miles between them
The first house went up in the 1600s, granite from sill to chimney, with a chestnut stair and a walled garden of camellias that are finished by the time you arrive. Six rooms are let and the family lives at the back. Dinner is at eight on the nights it is cooked, at one table, and if you are not there at eight you are eating in Ponte de Lima, 15 minutes away. Breakfast runs from 8:30 to 10:30: bread from the village oven, a hard sheep cheese from the hills behind the house, and jam that in May is last year's quince.
The second house works for its living. Eight hectares of alvarinho drop from the terrace to the river road, and across the water is Galicia, near enough to hear a dog. There are four rooms in the old wing, and the winery building is 30 yards from your door with the door standing open. Rooms look either into the vines or into the courtyard, and the reservation asks for the vines, which in May it usually gets.
Almost nobody drives the direct road between the two. The river road running east from Valença hangs above the Minho most of the way, with stone lamprey traps built out into the current below it, some of them medieval, each one repaired every winter by the family holding the right to it. The nets come out at the end of April. What you get in May is the stonework standing empty with the river going through it, and 45 miles that take two hours because you will stop.
Where the water is, and how cold it is
Six pools inside 40 minutes of one house or the other are written up for your week, with the temperature taken the week before you arrive and the parking noted, because two of them end in a farm track and a gate you have to close behind you.
Above Soajo the granite grain stores stand on a bare outcrop, 24 of them raised on stone legs with a cross cut into each gable, and the oldest carry a date on the lintel from the 1780s. They are still in use. Past the village the road climbs into the Peneda Gerês national park, and at Portela do Homem, on the border, a stretch of the Roman road survives with its mile stones standing in the heather where they were set, more than 100 of them along that line. The small native horses of the park graze loose up there and will not let you inside 30 feet of them.
Keep Sistelo for a clear morning. The hillside above the Vez is cut into stone walled terraces from the river to the ridge, still worked by hand, and the walk is about four hours with roughly 900 feet of climb inside the first mile. The paths are laid stone and stay wet in the shade even in May.
vines are bare posts, the rivers run high and brown, lamprey on every board along the Lima
mimosa out, rain two days in three, nobody is entering the water
camellias finished, rivers falling, the lamprey nets lifted at the end of the month
canopy closes over the posts, flowering in the last week, the Lima at 64 degrees, sun down at 8:50
maize knee high, first afternoons at 85, Ponte de Lima crowded on its market Monday
90 degrees inland, shallow pools low and green, the growers have no hours to give
vintage, and every pair of hands in the region is spoken for
4 inches of rain in two weeks, the villages shut by six
Markets, cabbage and the Monday board
Ponte de Lima holds its market on the riverside sand every second Monday, not every week, so on half the Mondays in May there is nothing under the bridge but parked cars. Ask which Monday falls inside your week before you build a day around it. The bridge is Roman on the far bank and medieval across the channel, and the sand it stands on has carried that market since the town was chartered in 1125.
Barcelos, 40 minutes south, gives up its main square every Thursday to a market that takes three hours to walk: pottery by the crate, seed potatoes, live hens, and cabbage plants already 2 feet tall for the winter soup. That cabbage is the tall loose leafed kind, cut leaf by leaf off a stem that stands in the field all year, and it is the whole point of the green soup you will be given at both houses.
The boards outside the riverside places turn over in May. Lamprey goes with the nets, and in comes kid goat out of a bread oven, salt cod done half a dozen ways, and the pork and blood dish nobody here tones down for a visitor. A dish of the day with wine at a village place runs about $12. The young wine they call vinho verde arrives in a shallow white bowl rather than a glass and is poured from a height, and both of those are ordinary here rather than done for your benefit.
How the eight nights are held, and who sends the bill
A figure you can act on takes two to four working days. Both houses answer by email and one of them answers at night, the car has to be quoted for the luggage you are actually bringing rather than the size that looks tidy on a page, and the terrace walk depends on which guide is not planting that week. What comes back to you is the week costed day by day, in writing.
Third Coast Dispatch Bookings LLC holds no rooms, no cars and no boats of its own. The houses are family businesses and the car comes from a rental company at the airport; each of them writes its own contract with you and bills you under it, in euros, at the house or at the counter. This office takes no payment of any kind at any stage, which also means there is nothing here that could be called a deposit.
No airfare is sold here either, so reaching Portugal is yours to arrange, and the week is written around the hour you actually land. The airport at Porto is 45 miles from the first house, about 50 minutes on the toll road. If you want the 10 minute ferry across the Minho into Galicia one afternoon, the company that runs the crossing holds it under its own licence and sells it at the slip; it is not part of this reservation and this office cannot hold it for you.
This office is at 600 SW Jefferson St, Suite 302, Lee's Summit, MO 64063, and Third Coast Dispatch Bookings LLC is registered in Missouri. Most of the people who reserve these eight nights are flying out of Kansas City. Call +1 (816) 525-2846 , or send your dates to bookings@thirdcoastdispatch.com, and say which week in May you want and whether either of you would rather not drive mountain roads. If a distance, a temperature or a figure on this page has gone stale, write to corrections@thirdcoastdispatch.com and it gets corrected.
Put a departure in front of the office
Open 24/7, this form will take a booking request whenever you write it. Nowhere on it is a card number requested and nothing is charged, because no money is ever owed to this office. Whatever reaches the form is opened in the order it landed, and an answer goes back inside one working day.
Nowhere on this page is a card number requested, and none is kept by this office anywhere. Writing costs you nothing and ties you to nothing. Asking is not the same as holding: your date belongs to whoever asks next until the operating company has confirmed it on paper and you have read what it requires of you.