Elvas

With a long goad he urges on the panting beasts yoked to the rudest of all vehicles, the bullock cart of Portugal.

Its low wheels, made of solid wooden blocks, are fastened to the axle-tree, which turns with them and at every step squeaks out complaining notes under the burden of a cask of the muddy and little-prized wine of the province, which is seeking a market at Elvas.

The carter is now overtaken by a peasant girl who, with basket on her arm, has been gathering chestnuts and balotas in the wood.

They are no strangers to each other, and she exchanges her brisk, elastic step for a pace better suited to that of the toiling oxen.

While she looks out with deep yet lively interest on the scenery before and around her, you naturally gaze with deeper interest only upon her.

Her companion is her maid, some years older than herself, who might be worth looking at were her mistress out of the way.

One of the orderlies, turning in his saddle, now points out the city to the old man, who in turn leans over to the coach window and calls out, My lady, there is Elvas.

And my father is in Elvas.

And we have all the old desserts, of course.

The Elvas plums and Carlsbad plums and almonds and raisins and crystallized fruit and ginger.

But I'm beginning to sound like a catalog from Fortnum and Mason.

You stimulate my gastronomic juices, madame.

Was there a seaside aspect to that?

No, actually the opposite, on the border with Spain in a place called Elvas, which is a UNESCO heritage.

That's as far as you can get from the sea while staying in Portugal.

Absolutely.

Portuguese called it the Reina de Frontera, the Queen of the Frontier, and it wasn't poetry.

Elvas is eleven miles from Badajoz, right on the rea, the most disputed borderline in the peninsula.

For eight hundred years, every army that wanted to enter Portugal had to come through here.

Romans, Moors, Castilians, Spaniards during the Restoration War of sixteen forty, Napoleon's French, the English, all of them broke against it.

The houses are low so they don't make a target for artillery.

The churches look like barracks on the outside and palaces on the inside.

Elvas was designed with one brutal idea: if the enemy entered the city, Fort Santa Luzia would keep shelling the city itself rather than surrender it.

We're not going out to the aqueduct or the forts.