Embedded in a stunning landscape, the villages of Gondar and Midões are two places of rare beauty, facing the Douro river. These two typical villages feature traditional architecture with the predominance of shale, witnessing, in a unique way, the presence of man for centuries in these slopes along the Douro. Gondarém, located in the middle slopes of the Douro river, with its picturesque alleys, offers an enviable view of the Douro landscape. The village of Midões also presents great beauty because of its architecture and fantastic scenery, especially the views of the imposing Boneca mountain on the other bank of the Douro.
The Douro valley has a unique landscape. Here, indigenous forests mainly of cork trees and pedunculate oak are interspersed with traces of some ancestral farming practices, as exemplified by the hanging vineyards – vines for the production of green (not ripe/acid) wines. In this environment, the diversity of flora is great, with the lote tree, the strawberry tree and the hawthorn occupying these slopes along the Douro. Here too remain some endemic species such as the furryanarrhinum – restricted plant to the northwest of the Iberian Peninsula – present in rockier areas. This fantastic landscape is also home to diverse birdlife, as the great cormorant, the great spotted woodpecker, the robin or the goldfinch and species of the herpetofauna, like the iberian emerald lizard, the fire salamander or the common toad. The landscape shows only too well the Boneca mountain, on the other bank of the Douro, and its impressive quartzite folds formed over 400 million years ago, in the deep ocean, witnessing some of the geological history of the Earth.
