Leaving town along the Ave
The Ave runs dark past the old shipyard at this hour. The cranes stand where they have always stood. Coffee and a pastel de nata in the square, then clip in. It’s time to discover Vila do Conde cycling!
The road rises almost immediately, a gentle two to three per cent gradient just enough to warm the legs. To the right the aqueduct lifts away on a long line of granite arches, running northeast toward Terroso. It is the last built landmark the ride offers for a while. Past the arches the road turns and the Atlantic drops off the shoulder.
The first hour inland
The back lanes take over within a few minutes. Narrow, well-surfaced where it matters, almost empty of cars on a weekday morning. Gradients stay in the 2 to 4 percent band, rolling rather than climbing, the kind of terrain that asks for a steady cadence.
Granite everywhere. Walls of it dividing one smallholding from the next, moss-dark on the north faces, grey on the south. The fields behind the walls are small. Half a hectare here, a quarter there, a row of cabbages, a lean-to, three hens.
A dog joins the ride outside a village I do not catch the name of. He trots at the back wheel for about four hundred metres and then peels off at some boundary only he can see. He has his patch and I have left it.
The vines and the pergolas
The vines arrive gradually and then they are everywhere. This is the latada system, the Minho’s high pergola, so you ride under the vines rather than past them. The leaves form a ceiling. The grapes hang at helmet height.
In July they are still small and hard and the colour of limes. You pass close enough to touch them and occasionally do, by accident, with a shoulder.
The pergolas open the land up in a way low-trained vines do not. Underneath the canopy the ground is still being farmed, cabbages, beans, maize in some plots, so every vineyard is also a vegetable garden, and the division of space is vertical rather than horizontal.
The road threads between these green tunnels and stone walls for most of the morning. Light comes through the leaves in broken pieces. The temperature under the canopy is noticeably cooler than the open stretches between villages.
The coast on the way back
The return leg works differently. Coming south from Viana the road picks up the Atlantic again and holds it on the right shoulder for the rest of the afternoon. A dedicated bike path carries most of the distance, running through dune country backed by pine. The smell changes first, resin, salt, pine needles in the sun, and then the sound, which is the low continuous push of surf.
Fishermen work the beach in places, nets laid out, a van parked on the sand. The wind, in the afternoon, is usually at your back.
Esposende comes up about halfway down. The Cávado reaches the Atlantic here, and the crossing is the second time in three days I have been over the same river by a different bridge. Past it the path resumes and the land flattens into the final run south.
Coming back across the Ave
The cranes come back into view before the town does. You see them first as thin verticals across the water, and then the estuary widens and Vila do Conde resolves itself on the south bank, the same shape it was at seven in the morning three days earlier.
The last kilometre runs along the Ave on the same road that carried me out. The café in the square is still open. I order the same coffee.
