Serpa

I drove to Serpa in the late afternoon and arrived as the town was waking from its siesta, the streets beginning to fill with the particular Alentejo version of late-day social life: groups of men outside cafés, the sound of a television from an open window, a woman sweeping a doorstep with the slow authority of someone who has swept it ten thousand times. The town sits inside medieval walls near the Spanish border, and it has a completeness to it, a sense of being a self-sufficient world — market, church, bakery, pharmacy, two or three restaurants that serve the same things they have always served and do not intend to change.

The aqueduct section that punctuates the town walls is the first thing you notice arriving from the north — a single archway of Roman-era stone that survived the earthquake of 1755, which destroyed most of the original structure and reduced a longer section to rubble scattered along the walls. The remaining arch stands with a dignity that the rest of the walls, patched and rebuilt in various periods, cannot quite match. It looks like it is patiently waiting for the rest of the aqueduct to catch up with it. I walked the walls in the late light and found a section of the original height still standing, giving a view across the surrounding plains to the south where Spain begins about twenty kilometers away, brown and flat and barely distinguishable from the Alentejo side.

The cheese is the reason Serpa appears on any serious food itinerary, and it is worth the trip on its own terms. Queijo de Serpa is a soft-rind sheep’s cheese with a PDO designation, made from the milk of Merino sheep that graze the dry plains, ripened for a minimum of thirty days until the interior becomes almost liquid and the flavor goes deep and complex — not sharp exactly, but insistent, with a lanolin undertone that stays on the palate for a long time. I bought a small round from a shop near the castle and ate most of it sitting on a wall outside with bread and a glass of the local wine. The shopkeeper, who had sold me the cheese with the specific confidence of someone selling something they know is excellent, watched from the doorway for a moment and gave a small nod when I finished.

Serpa has a small watch museum, the Museu do Relógio, which contains an improbable collection of around two thousand timepieces donated by a local clock enthusiast named Manuel Trindade. It is housed in a former convent and is one of the stranger small museums I have visited anywhere — not because the clocks are particularly rare, but because the accumulated presence of that many stopped time-keeping devices in a quiet Portuguese town creates a philosophical atmosphere entirely out of proportion to the collection’s size.

When to go: September through November for the cheese in peak condition, bearable temperatures, and the harvest festivals in the surrounding villages. Spring (March to May) is also excellent, when the wildflowers are at their most extravagant and the light has not yet turned punishing.