There are places where the landscape is the backdrop, and then there are places where the landscape takes over the entire show. Brufe was the second kind.

We had been looking for somewhere to stay in Gerês, but I wasn’t loving what I found. The landscape was spectacular, but the hotels weren’t quite doing it for me. I wanted something cool, something with character, something that felt as though it belonged there. Then I found Leiras do Tempo and suddenly the search was over.

Mostly because of the rocks.

Oh, the rocks.

Massive granite boulders are everywhere around the cottages, rising out of the earth, leaning into the hillsides and sitting among the buildings as though they had been there long before anyone thought about putting a hotel here. They are so enormous that they almost become part of the architecture. The cottages don’t try to compete with them. Stone, wood and glass simply settle into the landscape and let the rocks do what rocks do best: completely steal the show.

It was exactly what I had been looking for. Raw, beautiful, slightly wild and very cool.

And the setting just kept giving. The landscape around Brufe has an extraordinary sense of expanse. After the tighter roads and forested hills of Gerês, suddenly the mountains seem to open up and stretch forever. We would drive around a bend and find another enormous rock formation, another valley, another view that demanded a stop. At some point we stopped pretending we were going anywhere on time. There was always another miradouro, another reason to pull over and stare.

There was also a wonderful feeling of being somewhere that had not been tidied up for visitors. Brufe is tiny, with old granite houses, stone walls, agricultural buildings and traditional storage houses scattered through the landscape. There is something almost 17th-century about the village in places, as though the centuries have simply piled themselves onto the mountainside and carried on. Cows wander around with complete authority, which feels entirely appropriate. They belong here far more than we do.

Even the vegetation tells part of the story. The mountains still show the scars of the fires that have swept through this part of Portugal, with blackened areas and exposed slopes appearing among the greenery. But everywhere, nature is pushing its way back. New growth is creeping between the rocks, shrubs are reclaiming the hillsides, and the contrast between the damaged landscape and the returning green somehow makes the whole place feel even more alive.

At Leiras do Tempo, we quickly fell into the rhythm of it. Breakfast in the morning, surrounded by all that granite and mountain air, followed by a drive with no particular need to get anywhere quickly. Later, we’d settle into the bar with a glass of wine and that ridiculous view, watching the light move across the mountains. It was the sort of place where you could sit down for one drink and discover, an hour later, that you had no intention whatsoever of getting up.

The food was another reason to stay put. Breakfast was generous and beautifully suited to the setting, and dinner at the restaurant was not simply a convenient option because we were in the middle of nowhere. It was something we genuinely looked forward to. Good cooking, good wine and a restaurant that understood that the landscape outside was part of the experience. There is something particularly satisfying about eating well in a place this remote, when the food feels connected to where you are rather than imported from some anonymous idea of luxury.

And then there were the sunsets.

From the property, the mountains rolled away in layers, catching the last light of the day. The hard edges of the granite softened, the sky changed by the minute and everything seemed to slow down. Somewhere below us, music would occasionally drift up from the village. You couldn’t always tell where it was coming from, which made it even more atmospheric. One minute there was almost complete silence, and the next, a faint melody would travel up the mountainside.

It was a strange and wonderful combination: enormous rocks, enormous skies and the unmistakable sound of people living their lives somewhere below.

That, more than anything, was what I loved about Brufe. It never felt like a pretty little mountain village arranged for a photograph. It felt lived in. The old stone buildings, the cows, the music, the fires, the new vegetation, the granite and the roads that wind around the mountains because the mountains were there first. Everything belonged to the place.

Join us on this curated Northern Portugal adventure, enjoy our short film: