Cerdeira: slate village reborn through art

From slate steps to sculpture: how Cerdeira came back to life

Eighty metres of uneven slate climb from the valley floor, each tread dished by boots, hooves and bare soles. After rain the joints blaze emerald; the schist walls drink the thin morning light like a battery. No engines pass the top stone – vehicles surrender at the cork-oak parking terrace – so the only soundtrack is the Ribeira da Cerdeira fretting over its pebbles and the bell of a goat that has vaulted the paddock. At 802 m on the north-west flank of the Serra da Lousã, Cerdeira registers 188 residents on the parish roll, yet thirty years ago the head-count was forty-nine and falling.

Village that flat-lined

The 1986 murder that ended a neighbourly feud accelerated the exodus; whole families relocated to Sabugal or the Spanish border at Vilar Formoso. For eight consecutive years no birth was recorded. The reversal began in 1994 when Stuttgart sculptor Ursula Brummer bought Casa nº 42 for the equivalent of €2,500 and installed a kiln behind the communal wash-tank. A short item in the Gazeta da Beira of 3 March 1995 acted as an open call: by December seven more artists – three Germans, two Dutch, a French ceramicist and one Lisboan print-maker – owned roofless cottages. Today 34 of the 72 dwellings belong to the Cerdeira Foundation, created in 2009. The Casa das Artes e Ofícios, inserted into the stone loft once owned by João Velho, runs 18 residential workshops a year; Jorge W. Pereira’s high-fire ceramics course sold out in 48 hours in 2023.

Stone, gilt wood and water

At the stair-head the Romanesque doorway of Santiago church – the present one rebuilt with Trancoso oak after an 1897 fire – opens onto a single nave. José-Augusto França attributed the cedar-and-gilt baroque retable to master carver José de Almeida in 1968; inside the tabernacle sits a 37 cm silver casket dated 1734, payment-in-kind from a couple who ran the Spanish mines during the Seven Years’ War. Fifty metres higher, the 1951 Nossa Senhora de Fátima chapel doubles as a belvedere, framing fourteen dry-stone walls thrown up by the Silvano clan between 1786 and 1987. The Cerdeira levada, diverted from the stream in 1873, still drives the cast-iron paddles of the Moinho do Meio – now a two-bedroom lodge whose 1903 gearing has been left in situ. The communal bread oven, rebuilt in 1998 with local limestone, fires at 04:30 every 25 July for São Tiago; eighteen kid goats roast, and each household chips in €5 for firewood and maintenance.

Kid, chanfana and red-deer rut

Cerdeira’s kitchen revolves around IGP-labelled Beira kid. Fourteen breeders deliver to Sabugal’s municipal abattoir each Thursday; within 48 hours the meat appears at O Céu na Boca, slow-roasted over black-oak for three and a half hours and served with Trancoso sweet potatoes and a peppery DOP Beira Alta olive oil pressed 12 km away in Aldeia Viçosa. November’s new-season oil is sold in 250 ml bottles at the village shop for €7.50. Winter brings wild-boar stew, cured ewe’s cheese from Zé Manel’s cellar and chanfana – goat slow-cooked in black pottery with red wine, bay and mountain garlic. The local bakery, Doce Pedra, invented “slate biscuits” in 2003: acorn flour and burnt sugar, €2.20 apiece. Breakfast at Café da Videira (€7) pairs sourdough from A Pão de Céu with homemade strawberry-tree jam. From mid-September the red deer begin to roar; the peak is 15-25 September when up to fourteen stags can be logged in a single evening. Biologist Rui Carvalho’s night-time safari (€25 pp, minimum four) leaves the square at 20:30 and returns by midnight. Since March 2011 none of the twelve guest houses has offered a television – a unanimous owners’ vote that predates the current appetite for digital detox by several years.

Open-air sculpture park

“Cerdeira à Solta – Art meets Nature” began in 2012 when parish council chair Paulo Ventura invited José Aurélio to install “Stone Woman” in the threshing-yard. Forty-three sculptors have since followed; the 2023 edition drew eighteen artists from seven countries, the most Instagrammed piece being Tchai de Sousa’s five-metre beech-root cast in iron, bolted to the terrace of house nº 27. The PR2 Lousã footpath strikes out from the square towards the Penedos de Góis, a 12 km way-marked traverse that drops into oak forest before re-ascending to 1,000 m; allow four and a half hours. A 3.2 km loop north-east leads to the Fraga da Pena waterfall, a twenty-metre slide of water first sign-posted in 1995 and now fitted with a cedar viewing balcony.

At dusk the village sound-track contracts to water over granite. The stream never ceased, not even during the eight hollow years between 1986 and 1994 when even Quim Marques’s dog had been rehomed lower down the mountain.