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The region of Gois, central Portugal
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Vale Godinho  
 

Gois

Vale Godinho  
      
 

Vale Godinho

The village of Vale Godinho (‘valley of the small round pebbles’) sits on the side of a small valley, looking down to the village of Bordeiro and across to São Martinho. It is a mixture of old and new houses around four lanes that fan out from the centre of the village. In the year 2000, the Associação de Melhoramentos de Vale de Godinho opened the Casa do Convivio, (community house) which is a beautifully restored xisto building, open to the villagers every weekend and most evenings for games of cards, dominoes, table tennis and table football. On the outskirts of Vale Godinho are several small xisto buildings, once used to house sheep and goats that grazed the hills above the village. The wool was spun and woven into brightly-coloured rugs on a loom housed in one of the buildings across from the Casa do Convivio. Despite being closed for many years, there are still rugs in use in the village that were woven on this loom.  Some of the villagers still collect sap from the pine trees around the village.

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We were kindly shown, by two of Vale Godinho’s residents, the tools that they use to collect the pine-sap, or resin, and they explained that in the past , the resin was sold to Arganil or Chã de Alvares, but now it goes to Leiria to be used in the production of turpentine. The collecting of resin starts in February end ends on the last day of October. An acid is used to make the resin ooze out of the pine tree, and every month the little clay or plastic bowls are emptied out into a canister. About 2 kg of resin is collected from each tree over the season. The workers are very careful only to take as much resin as the tree can sustain the loss of.
There is a small shrine in Vale Godinho, at the base of which is a small iron box cut into the stone where people can traditionally leave money for charity.
The old water supply for the village comes from the Levada do Albaról, dug many centuries ago, and attributed to the Moors (a clue lies in the name  - any  name starting with ‘Al’ is likely to be of Moorish derivation).  In the past, we were told, people from the village worked in the mines of Liboreiro, there were many oxen working in the fields and the olives were taken to be pressed in Regateira.

 
     
 
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  Updated 20 June, 2008
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