A extensive twisting road prospects up Portugal’s best mountain, and listed here, unlike quite a few other European summits, website visitors can push appropriate to the top. The peak rises 1,993m above sea degree, and though its genuine identify is Torre (tower), most individuals just get in touch with it by the exact designation as the array it lofts about: Serra da Estrela or “mountain of the stars”.
By day, the generate provides great views across the undulant landscape of this narrow region – from the red hills of Spain in the east to the blue Atlantic Ocean in the west. Nevertheless, the true spectacle arrives as the solar starts off to drop. Not only is this mountain a popular place to observe golden sunsets, but for people who remain afterwards, it features a glimmering evening-time fresco that covers the heavens, built up of millions of white pinpricks scattered in superb imperfection.
In excess of the earlier 10 years, Portugal has gained recognition for being one of the best sites in the planet for travellers to notice the night sky, thanks to the creation of the 3,000 sq km Dim Sky Alqueva reserve, in Portugal’s central Alentejo region. In 2011, the reserve was qualified as the world’s to start with Starlight Tourism Place by the Starlight Basis, a Unesco-supported global organisation that promotes science and tourism. This position celebrates the region’s best viewing problems (low concentrations of gentle pollution and an typical of 286 cloudless nights for each 12 months, which final result in some of Portugal’s darkest skies), but also the wider tourism infrastructure it has motivated, which is established up to cater especially to stargazers.
Dark Sky Alqueva is also the starting off place for a gorgeous 3-hour road journey that can take you through some of the the very least light-weight-polluted pieces of Europe, winding along the area’s Dim Sky Route (a curated selection of routines and accommodations), and rising all the way to Portugal’s optimum peak, fittingly known as the Serra da Estrela, or “mountain of stars”.
My good friend and I began our intergalactic journey 300km south of Serra da Estrela on a particularly dim night time in the village of Cumeada, wherever a college has been transformed into Dark Sky Alqueva’s observatory, which hosts stargazing sessions and astrophotography exhibitions. Right here we met Miguel Claro, a guideline and Dim Sky Alqueva’s formal photographer.
“Portugal is waking up to this immensely special and important natural source that has lengthy been underappreciated,” Claro stated. “Darkish Sky Alqueva is the astronomical equivalent of the large wave ‘discovered’ by surfers in Nazaré – anything that had been hiding in plain sight, ready for people today with the appropriate sensitivity to choose a closer glance.”
Claro is a deep-space expert, and when he is not using groups on evening-time stargazing expeditions, he spends his time photographing far-absent objects like nebulae, galaxies and star clusters. These are points that can appear faint and underwhelming to the naked eye or even by means of an eyepiece of a telescope but explode with colour and detail when photographed.