Trip to Fojo das Valerias #2 - S.Justa Valongo | Portugal
I need to start this post by confessing that yesterday, had to change practically everything i wrote at the end of the post, and luckily, didn’t have to structure everything that had been written and i’ll explain why…
I started to write, completely convinced that this place i had found was something i was seeing for the first time in that mountain range that i practically covered from one end to the other during my adolescence, and i remember being there and having commented that it would be approximately in that area that the fojo "pit" that i knew would be located, and after some research even before finishing the post, simply because i did not want to launch a title about something unknown, i verified that it was in fact the Valerias fojo, a place not visited for many years and in which one of the riskiest adventures ever spent in that mountain took place.
And i want to believe that i didn't recognize the place because the access was made by another direction and we went down the escarpment with ropes and with time the memory ends up retaining only a few details and distorting the reality.
At that time, the vegetation was also much more dense and perhaps that was why at that time we had not noticed that there was a small entrance dug in the stone that led us practically to the interior of this cavity, also excavated by the Romans.
I took the first photos at the edge of the slope and was ready to go down the mountain when i noticed a kind of fence that ended in an opening in the middle of the vegetation a little further down and that's when i found this entrance that allowed me to enter and photograph this entire gallery.
It was here that, with professional climbing equipment, which was provided to us by the Valongo speleological group ... well, it was certainly not supplied, it was actually requested by a colleague of ours who knew how to open the back door of the headquarters, and brought the borrowed material and then returned it back at the end of the day, between ropes, belts, helmets and even climbing gloves, because it is worth mentioning, for a group of teenagers to do what we did there, all the care and safety are necessary, it was there that on a beautiful summer afternoon we decided, with the right material, to enter an open hole in a wall, and not knowing what to expect on the other side, to put the carabiners and with the rope start a descent supported on the wall.
The problem was that at a certain point, we entered a huge underground gallery and the walls started to become rounded and we were completely suspended without any support, and so we only had 2 options, or go back up, with the strength of our arms, or continue to descend, and we continued the descent, but a few meters later a new problem arose ... we did not have enough rope to reach the ground and at a certain point we would have to let go and start a free fall to the ground.
Our luck was that we didn't have to jump more than 4 or 5 meters.
I don't want to bore anyone with a lot of details, so to sum up and have an idea of the difficulty we had to get out of there, we went in around 3:00 pm and when we finally managed to see the sky again it was already 7:00 pm and it was already getting dark and some of our friends were already going to the city to call the fire department, because at that time we still didn't have cell phones to call for help.
Here in this fojo, there is also a small ditch full of water through which professional divers enter to practice underground diving through the extensive channels that exist in this place.
It is a good thing that the speleological group did not have oxygen cylinders, because at that time we had to entertain ourselves with something and it could have passed by our minds :P
In conclusion, it was very interesting to remember these moments and to have returned to that place, this time with my daughter and to know that these places will remain in her memory, as they were in mine when i visited these fojos for the first time with my grandfather :)
That´s all for today :)
See you soon
Thank you for watching :)