Massarelos Trench

I’ve spent four weeks piecing together the slopes of Massarelos, but the basic shape of the place is still elusive. This morning, under the sycamores that line the Rua de Dom Pedro V, I found a stone ramp that led somewhere completely new.

The region below was surprisingly large and completely untended: a canyon cutting through the old core of the city, surrounded by walls of pale river-stone on three sides and filled with a thick, continuous mass of ivy that swarmed south toward the Douro. Two nicely preserved farmhouses stayed afloat above the green, but there didn’t seem to be a path to either. A humid wind echoed off the glass above.

At the base of the ramp, a large vault opened back into the stone, where a few basins, a streetlight, and large iron gates marked the entrance to the city’s cisterns. Someone was living on a narrow stone slab over the water.

Back on the path, the beginnings of roads and steps started to appear, always trailing off toward the trench’s center where they were lost in flowering vines and firework clusters of Lily of the Nile. It all seemed to suggest another level of the forgotten neighborhood, farther down still and fully covered by the green. The foundation of a tenement poked out, likely leveled decades ago.

What was left of the buildings’ walls stood out as a faint, raised outline in the mass of the ivy. I made my way out along the grid, the thicket compressing lightly until it touched down on the crumbling, jagged remnants of whatever lay beneath. Here and there, part of a window emerged, opening down into preserved layers of the vanished tenements—now stuffed with waterlogged sacks and home appliances. I peered into the first only long enough to see the dim traces of a hallway overflowing with miniature electric radiators.

Through a larger hole in the ivy, I could make out more tarp structures—though these were farther down than seemed possible, suggesting that this was a higher story than I’d imagined. I couldn’t stop thinking about the first scene from Spirited Away. A better version of me would have done a pencil dive into the ivy-clad abyss.

Farther south, I rejoined the path as it sank back into the colorful houses and narrow squares.