casa brooker

last weekend, under the intense heat, i went to lousã to meet my friends from london (yes cristina, you ARE already from london) and lisbon.

lousã is a nice and friendly village in the outskirts of coimbra, my home town, which i left at the age of 17.

when i was a child, we used to go a lot to the Serra da Lousã, for walks around the castle. we would climb the hill up to the chapel of Srª da Piedade (Lady of Mercy), maybe have a picnic around there and finish the stay with a nice refreshing swim at the natural pool. when I was around 13, I went to one of the small abandoned villages – Cerdeira - with my scouts group. we “camped” inside one of the houses, after cleaning it up and covering the windows as we could. we would get water from a near by crook, make bread in the old kitchen and just enjoyed nature really. it was a great relaxing weekend.

years later, paul & jan were thinking about buying a house in portugal and were asking around about places that they might like. the first place that came to my mind was lousã, because i knew they enjoy hiking and the countryside rather then crowds and the seaside, and that they would need it to be a place with a fairly good transport system. i told them that, they looked around and it turned out i was right. they bought this nice house by the rail tracks, and that’s how we found out paul was a real trainspotter.

i’m glad they’ve enjoyed lousã so much and got the house there. it is always so nice to go back!