From our Atelier

Due to poor internet facilities, and exhaustion from traipsing around too many historical sites and Museums, I have fallen behind in recording stuff I want to remember. I will just have to try and fill in some gaps later. Fortunately, we are now at a place so beautiful and interesting from several different perspectives, that George has been moved to make a note of it, and he has kindly allowed me to put his prose on my blog. What follows is George speaking until further notice.

Mertola is a hill town in the south east corner of Alentejo and of Portugal. It is described as a museum town and that is true in every sense. Several good museums, an excavated Roman town centre and a seriously good castle, but houses falling down and for sale in all directions (sometimes the same houses). At about 160 ft, it is at a lower altitude than Evora (1150 ft) and Beja (650 ft) but still pretty cool until the sun comes out. The area is obviously drier than either of those, and much drier than Lisbon: we have been here 24 hours with no rain yet.

The town is strung along a hilltop, really a crag. The old, upper part of the town is enclosed by its walls, which are mostly intact. The lower part of the town, which has streets instead of alleys, is on one slope of the hill. The castle sits on top, with a view for miles. As usual, the Romans started it, quite possibly on an Iron Age base, the Visigoths and Moors improved it (well, repaired it anyway) and then King Dinis came along in the C13th and made a proper job of it, to keep out the meddling Castilians. It has been repaired in the last century and is quite impressive.

Much of the upper town was not repaired in the last century, and is falling down. There are a lot of nice houses and some grand views, but you can peer down from the castle and count the ruins. A pity, but many of the houses must be pretty inconvenient: small, damp, and seemingly without adequate running water, as bottled drinking water is delivered all over the old town.

We are staying in an old monastery just outside Mertola (the Convento de Sao Francisco) which a Dutch family have rescued from falling down and turned into an artist colony and environmental showcase. As well as the main house and the workshop in the former church, there are several rooms available for artists in residence, but none are residing at present, so we have one of the rooms. It is a large studio apartment with a bathroom, kitchen, sleeping loft, hot water that works, fridge that doesn't, wood stove and draughts. Out the back, it has a good view of a hillside with scrub, gum trees, swifts, hawks etc, and if you peer around the corner a bit, a good view of Mertola perched on its crag. If you walk up the hill to the clothesline, there is a spectacular view over the convent buildings, the town, the valley of the river Guadiana and a lot of storks nesting around the convent.

The convent was founded by the C17th, and there are old statues from here of Sao Francesco and Sao Antonio in a museum of sacred art in the town. The order was expelled from Portugal in 1834 and the buildings then ceased to be used for ecclesiastical purposes. They were not well looked after from then until 1980, when the Zwanniken family took them over. Some of the roofs fell in and some of the outlying buildings are ruined, but the former church is still structurally sound, though nearly all decoration has been removed by passers-by, museum curators or the damp. The central part of the monastery has been restored, and the project is now being extended to a nearby building, in which our room is.

When I say they have rescued it from falling down, that's a work in progress. The recent rain got into a wall in the room next to ours, and the wall collapsed. Since they are mainly mud, with a stone facing, once the roof falls in, the walls don't last long. Now a couple of men are working at rebuilding that wall and putting a new roof on the room. They are using what seems to be a Portuguese specialty, which is a sort of hollow brick like a ceramic breeze block. Usually anything like that is found in a museum, labelled flue tile from Roman bath-house. Utter confusion awaits archaeologists of the future.

Internet connection here is a bit ropy. The convent is wired for ethernet and ADSL, which both work, but they have forgotten the combination to connect to their ISP (the man who knows it is snowed in, in Holland). The mobile broadband works, but only in the morning, and even then it's on-and-off. Odd, since from the clothesline we can see the mobile phone towers across the river: perhaps Vodafone.pt's hamsters get tired as the day goes on. One of the museum staff at the castle has a mobile broadband key and a line of sight to the mobile phone towers not a mile away, with nothing at all between, apart from the odd swift, and her connection was flickering. [Later - Vodafone must have seen that bit, and given the hamsters some more crunchies. The connection is OK tonight.]

Back to me now. The only other visitor here is a young woman from Holland who is writing poetry. I will claim to be a textile artist if anyone asks. We met the young poet this afternoon in town. She had just descended from the tower of the castle as we were about ascend. I asked how the poetry was going. "Very well", she said, "the atmosphere is so special you just want to write or paint or make music" She is obviously right because as far as I am aware, this is the first time George has been moved to prose by our surroundings.

Our hosts speak English, and have a small herd of cats and several dogs.. All of them were rescued from abandonment and neglect - apparently a common thing in Portugal, they could do with a Hugh Worth to straighten them out a bit. Despite all the cats and dogs there are lots of storks building nests, and hawks just thinking about nesting in the tower specially built for them. As mentioned earlier, lots of swifts, and plenty of other birds I haven't identified. There are also half a dozen horses here, I suspect acquired on much the same basis as the dogs and cats. I asked Louis what the horses do, "Oh they eat grass and hay" The only working equine obvious is the mechanical donkey, created by a son of the house, a sculptor specialising in kinetic works. I won't even attempt to describe this creation, made to operate the the donkey works that powers the chain and bucket system that raises the water from a well that is the heart of a restored watering system for the convent garden. Tomorrow I will resist the attractions of the town and take photos here.

I just thought to add a link to the web site, and I'm powerfully reminded of a slightly embarrassing fact - this place is very like Ceres, only on an old monastery site instead of an old quarry turned rubbish tip, and it looks across a river to a museum town, instead of across the Merri creek to an industrial estate in Northcote. And it's more fun to be at either of them than to read the propaganda on their websites. Convento de Sao Francisco Ceres