Introduction by Kasra Lang & Photographs by Jim Johnston

A story from the Portugal magazine

Straddling the Spanish border in a horseshoe valley, Peneda-Gerês is Portugal’s great wilderness. Its bleak granite peaks, hundreds of millions of years old, overlook a vast, wind-worn moor streaked with evergreen shrubs and flowering heather. It rains, on average, every three days - but at those heights, and in that soil, nothing else can grow. Only at lower altitudes does this expanse close in at last on laurels and English oak, sloping down the valley to the wetlands, where willows flank the rivers and nightshade springs up from the marsh. 

Gerês is the country’s only national park and special amongst Europe’s shrinking wilds for the shelter it affords its animals. There are eagles overhead and vipers underfoot. Rare bats emerge at dusk. The oak forests swarm with boars and wildcats, while the moors harbour free-roaming Garranos, a feral pony whose ancient Celtic breed is all but unchanged since the Palaeolithic. But like elsewhere in Europe there is evidence all around of human encroachment. Some creatures face extinction, others have already vanished. It’s been 300 years since the last bear died in these mountains and only a few dozen wolves survive to stalk the valley hamlets from above, occasionally snatching dogs or even donkeys in the night. Forever the object of awe and scorn, these wolves remain threatened by illegal hunting; their formal protection from Lisbon may not save them.  

Indeed, for a place so hostile to people, Gerês teems with human history. Stone Age dolmens dot the highland massifs. Medieval castles and monasteries lie semi-ruined on the hilltop greens. There is even an old Roman road cutting through the forest into Spain, in parts remarkably well preserved, its ruts worn pebble-smooth by two millennia of rain and traffic. More recently, the stone granaries of Soajo and Lindoso have become symbols of the park’s village life. Raised on mushroom-shaped stilts to fend off rats and other raiding critters, they have been used for centuries to store the community crop and are emblematic of the region’s collective spirit. To the uninitiated eye, however, these are haunting Gothic structures. Clustered on granite bluffs above the parish, smothered in moss, adorned with crosses, they look like elaborate tombs - one imagines a cemetery whose dead have, in time, come to outnumber the living. 

It’s a beautiful place, fragile, delicately poised. In the elegance and languid stillness of his photographs, Jim Johnston captures this underlying tension - between the ancient woods and the new asphalt road, the silent cliffs and the murmuring village, the wild and the human. Where these competing worlds meet, Gerês is forced to balance its past and present. A lasting reconciliation, or a final clash, will settle its future.