PR2 SMP Trilho das Belas Vistas

The church of Fornelos serves as a starting point for the Belas Vistas trail, a 12.6 km pedestrian route. It is here that the eyes flee to the heights, to the top of the mountain where the Chapel of Nossa Senhora do Viso challenges our legs and breath, and it is a silent, but clear, invitation to the walker's spirit. As you travel these kilometers, which lead the audacious to set their legs on the road, with their eyes set on the challenging heights, magnificent views are foreseen. Even before we reach the top, the landscape is magnificent with villages founded on the hill next to it and Marão waving higher, imposing in the grandeur of its granite. Up there, you will need to catch a breath when we look directly at Marão. The trail is done almost entirely in nature, in the protection of the leaves of Corylus avellana (hazelnut) and Castanea sativa (chestnut), pine and oak, sweet elderberries (Sambucus) and with an aromatic flowering bouquets.

The São Pedro Viewpoint deserves a mention, given the proximity to the Belas Vistas trail. Located near the town of Fontes and at an altitude of 657 meters, it offers stunning views over the Serra do Marão and the surrounding region, from a 360 degrees perspective.The trail starts to descend, but the surprises are not over yet. The hills are lost in successive wavy lines, hesitant between blue and grey, where the linearity of the vineyards is combined with the dotted lines of houses and olive groves, in chromatic variation depending on the season. Thus, the spring green faints in ochres and oxides, in seine-lands and dry greens in summer, in warm sepia, brown and seductive blacks in autumn, until the possible icy whites of winter, which bewitch the photographers' gaze and all souls sensitive to the combined beauty of the spontaneous with the thought.

From the top of these 657m there is no landscape that cannot be seen. With a complete 360º view, you can look, as far as the eye can see,from Vila Real to Peso da Régua, mountains, vineyard slopes and green valleys with some patches of forest and olive groves.

The parish of Fontes, located on the half slope of this elevation,was, in times gone by, a castro, later occupied by the Romans. It was a town and county seat until the liberal reforms of 1836.

The expression of the stone flourishes of the Douro Vinhateiro is clearly visible. The geological events that created the region's orography gave it distinct styles of deformation, between tight and wider folds, but both in a similar direction. The transition between these two regions is brief but continuous, and constitutes what was called the Transition Strip Santa Marta de Penaguião – Ermida.

On the Marão – Vila Nova de Foz Côa axis, the deformation is less intense, creating wider and less accentuated ripples, but with intermediate points of intense folds. It is this alternation that creates the structure in Flor do Douro (Douro Flower Structure), expressing itself in the valleys well embedded between the hills, often with a very steep slope.