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12 small villages of Beira

Hello - I have not seen these Government (1991) designated Historic villages mentioned in Rick Steve's book and wonder if anyone has traveled around them. They sound delightful but they are not talked about in many travelogues

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For other potential responders, you can see the villages here: historic villages of Beira. I have not been to any of them but did enjoy the much larger Viseu and Guarda decades ago. This would be a nice area to visit with a car. I suspect depending on public transportation would make things quite difficult.

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We're just back from an 18 day road trip around Portugal. We spent several days in the countryside visiting small villages. We visited 3 of the villages listed in the link above.

Castelo Rodrigo was where we stayed to take a tour of the Paleolithic rock art carvings along the Coa River with our B&B hostess. They were amazing. The village is very small and inside the castle walls.
Monsanto was fascinating with buildings sandwiched in between and under huge boulders with a castle on the hilltop. We stopped for a couple of hours enroute to Castelo Rodrigo.
We spent a night in Piodao which is a schist village built among terraces on a hillside in the mountains. It's charming and the view from the hotel on the neighboring hill is lovely. There's a website listing several other schist villages if you google.
We also spent a night in Monsaraz which is a white village around a castle on a hill. It's a designated dark sky area and there's an observatory that does star programs.
We stayed in Elvas which is a fortified town with star shaped walls and two star shaped forts. It's a UNESCO site. There's a huge aqueduct there also. These two are in the Alentejo region just north of Evora.
The countryside is not well covered in the RS Portugal guide but I found lots of info for less visited places on the Julie Dawn Fox in Portugal website.