Alvarenga

On the right bank of the Rio Paiva, under the foothills of the Serra de Montemuro, Alvarenga is a compact mountain parish of the Arouca municipality with an administrative past bigger than its size: it was once a town and the seat of its own county, and its large stone pillory of 1590 still recalls those years at the centre of the village.

A county that became a village

Until the administrative reforms of the nineteenth century, Alvarenga governed a territory that included the neighbouring parishes of Canelas and Janarde, with its own court and officials; the county was suppressed in 1886 and the town gradually became a village of Arouca. Emigration, above all to Brazil, marked the decades that followed, and the mountains around gave one more crop: tungsten ore, mined intensively during the wars of the twentieth century, with the Parish’s slopes keeping the adits and memories of that boom.

River, trails and mountain life

Today the Paiva gives the parish its life: canoeing and river trekking descend the water below the old Ponte 516 Arouca country upstream, and walkers follow paths over the Montemuro foothills between hamlets of granite and heath. The parish church of Santa Cruz stands above the old centre, and the landscapes of the Passadiços do Paiva and the wider Arouca UNESCO Global Geopark begin a short drive to the north.

What to see

• The pillory of 1590 and the former town hall
• The parish church of Santa Cruz
• The Rio Paiva and its canoeing and river-trekking runs
• The trails of the Montemuro foothills
• The old tungsten workings of the mountainside

Practical information

Alvarenga lies in the municipality of Arouca, in the Aveiro district, about fifteen kilometres from the town of Arouca on the right bank of the Paiva. Mountain roads are narrow: allow time, bring layers for the altitude, and check the official websites before setting out.

Image credit: Ponte de Alvarenga – Portugal by Vitor Oliveira — CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.