Pulo do Lobo

The Guadiana has flowed quietly through the Alentejo for hundreds of kilometres when, all at once, it loses its temper. At Pulo do Lobo the great river squeezes into a gorge a few metres wide and drops some twenty metres in a roar of white water — the highest waterfall in southern Portugal.

The wolf’s leap

The name means the wolf’s leap: only a desperate animal, the legend says, could cross this chasm in a single bound. The gorge marks the place where the river cuts through hard Palaeozoic rock, and the viewpoints on either bank reveal the strangeness of the site — upstream, the old, broader riverbed carved by ancient climates; below, a channel polished by millennia of water. José Saramago, who knew this country well, wrote that here the river ‘boils between harsh walls’. The waterfall lies inside the Guadiana Valley Natural Park, between the walled town of Serpa and the river port of Mértola.

What to see

• The gorge and waterfall from the right-bank viewpoint
• Pego dos Sáveis, where the river calms again
• The cork-oak and steppe landscapes of the natural park
• The river beaches of the Guadiana, nearby
• The rock engravings of the Guadiana basin

Practical information

Reach the main viewpoint from the village of Vale de Poços, signed off the Serpa road; the left-bank route starts from Amendoeira, on the Mértola–Beja road. The tracks are dirt roads — go slowly, and avoid midday heat in summer. There are no facilities at the falls.

Image credit: Pulo do Lobo by Migaspinto — CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.