Levels Of History Layers Of Land

With towns made of marble, a landscape dotted with prehistoric remains and 2,000-year-old winemaking traditions kept alive by enterprising locals, the fiercely proud Portuguese region of Alentejo is where time rolls back and the past sits cheek by jowl with the present.

- Julia Buckley

'ON A CLEAR DAY YOU CAN SEE FOREVER' reads the 200ft-long steel sculpture at the edge of the Alqueva Dam. It is indeed a clear day, and the views stretch… not forever, but certainly far, teasing the edges of one of Western Europe’s largest artificial lakes.

Alqueva’s hilly landscape is covered in summer-browned grass and dotted with cork and olive trees. Unlike Lake Geneva or Garda, there’s no roundness to the Great Lake’s coastline — it jabs back and forth like a boxer, reaching round to the left, slithering off to the right, and wriggling out of view, without seeming to finish. Maybe that’s what the sculpture means by ‘forever’.

From the right comes the gentle sound of bells: butterscotch cows and lean sheep, collars clunking discordant tunes as they graze under the olive trees. And to the left are an uncountable number of white birds: gulls, terns, I’m not sure; they blend into a morass. They perch on the edge of this monumental — and monumentally controversial — dam.

Alqueva is the heart of Alentejo, which is itself the heart of Portugal: a third of the country but the whole of its rural bloodstream. Only a couple of hours from Lisbon, this feels like wilderness — an unbroken landscape of cork fields, sometimes savannah-flat, sometimes with hills as perfectly rounded as those in Tellytubbyland.

It’s a land of extremes: scorching in summer and cold in winter, and it’s dry — very dry. Which is why, in 2002, the authorities dammed up the Guadiana River and created this 97sq-mile reservoir. Villages were flooded and farms repossessed; locals staged mournful protests. Even those who weren’t displaced were furious. “I remember the landscape as it was, Iago, my waiter had told me the night before, eyes flashing. “It was much, much more beautiful.