It appears a monotonous flat. When you approach Idanha-a-Nova coming from Castelo Branco, Cáceres or Plasencia, our eyes are filled with the vastness, golden in the summer or spotted with flowers and their perfume in the spring. The sceneries you cross are overwhelming, you’ll lose the sense of scale: the proportions are lost in the limit of what our eyes can see. The flora richness blooms in April, when tens of local species make the sooth hills explode with color in the Erges’ slopes. This is a river where you trip on when the curiosity persists, that will transform from a pebble’s desert on hot weather to a wild river, full of energy during the rainy season.

From north to south, the schists are ripped and the granites of Salvaterra do Extremo and Segura are worked into deep gorges that echoe the sounds of the Vulture and of the Imperial Eagle. In “Salto da Cabra” you look the erosion of times “in the eyes” in “Peñafiel Castle” without understanding the urge of Erges to reach the huge International “Tejo” for the south, hidden by the peneplain. This are lands of silence for the ones who wish to hear the rosemary growing… silences interrupted in September by the bold calling for pleasure of the deer…

On the horizon, the grey stains of the granitic Gardunha and Serra da Estrela mountains letting you guess another Portugal to the West. To get there you have to cross an impressive fault scarp crowned with a natural wall of granite boulders where Idanha-a-Nova has rested for 800 years. In “Termas de Monfortinho” the fault’s activity materializes a unique oasis of well being where the mineralized geothermal waters reconcile us with Nature.

The septentrional horizons are obliterated by a natural wall duplicated by post tectonic events: the “Penha Garcia” mountains. As you walk its tracks you get overwhelmed with feelings of a dialog between past and present. To go down to the depths of Ponsul river is to dive in time into a primordial ocean with 500 million years. To hunt for its treasures you can descend the vertical strata or fly through the quartzitic canyon or even read a biological writing yet to be deciphered that fills the pages of this stony encyclopedia.

In the middle of the immensity of this place, observed from many cardinal points, stands the most beautiful Babel. A natural ruin that stretches to the heights, “Monsanto” blurs our senses with its granitic greatness and opulence. Apparently unique, each and every boulder was molded and risen by the elements for millions of years according to patterns that excite our imagination. The wisdom and primordial knowledge of Men made of this suspended balcony to the wide spaces a way of life, a state of mind, a strengthen of the Being and of the Wanting.

These ancient lands, as old as the oldest schist, worn and planed for over 600 million years of geological convulsions, are a priceless portion of the Naturtejo-Geopark. This place hides something special… and intransmissible. It’s a puzzle of landscapes in time and space that takes time to solve within us in the serenity and individuality of reason.