Day 7 – Thursday 4 July 2024
If we’d been on the usual 7 day Douro cruise, we’d be vacating our cabin and heading to Porto airport for the flight home. But we had another four nights on board. The other boat had gone by 07:30 and our cabin faced the river bank.
We left at the civilised hour of 09:30 for the Cao Palaeolithic Museum. This is seemingly in the middle of nowhere high on a promontory overlooking the Douro where the Cao River joins it. Plans were well progressed to build a dam at the mouth of the Cao. The dam company’s tame archaeologists said there was nothing of importance that would be obliterated and that pictographs which had been reported were modern graffiti. A change of government stopped the project and it was found that many thousands of prehistoric carvings were visible in sheets of schist along the Cao river. They had been made over thousands of years.
The modern museum offered replicas and explanations of the carvings found for those that couldn’t venture to the almost inaccessible originals. A demonstration of Palaeolithic tools and techniques, including fire making, ended the visit leaving just time to admire the views and go down a wooden walkway overlooking the Douro.
Lunch on board was a barbecue on the sun deck. Salads, sardines chicken, potatoes etc. Waiters served ice-cream for dessert.
The mooring was next to a lock and about 13:00 we moved into it, reaching Pinhão at 17:30 – an hour before the scheduled time. We felt the boat could have travelled more slowly, giving us time to admire the beauty of the Douro.
Overnight Location: Pinhão
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