A Carriage Ride through the Montado

The story

Before the motor car, the montado moved at the pace of the horse, and on this ride it does again. A pair of white Lusitano horses is harnessed to a black carriage, the driver takes the box in jacket and wide-brimmed hat, and the guests settle into the seats behind as the carriage rolls off the gravel and onto the estate's dirt tracks. The pace is the whole point: slow enough that the country can be watched properly — the stripped and healing cork oaks, the stone walls built stone by stone, the cattle resting in the shade, the whitewashed house appearing and disappearing between the trees. The driver works the reins in silence except for the names of what passes: which oak was stripped this year, where the pigs root at dusk, why the walls turn exactly where they do. Halfway through the carriage stops under a great cork oak for a glass of wine and bread from the estate, and the last stretch is driven in the low sun, hooves and wheels on dry earth, all the way back to the house.