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Aigra Nova |
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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.
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. |
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| Updated 20 June, 2008 | ||||||||||||||||||