they are cultivated with the care of
a garden. All along the valleys, and even high up the hillsides among
the huge granite boulders, there is a continuous succession of small
villages. Many of these, lying far from railway or highroad, can only be
reached by narrow and uneven paths, along which no carriage can pass
except the heavy creaking carts drawn by the beautiful large long-horned
oxen whose broad and splendidly carved yokes are so remarkable a feature
of the country lying between the Vouga and the Cavado.[31] In many of
these villages may still be seen churches built soon after the
expulsion of the Moors, and long before the establishment of the
Monarchy. Many of them originally belonged to some monastic body. Of
these the larger part have been altered and spoiled during the
seventeenth or eighteenth centuries, when, after the expulsion of the
Spaniards, the country began again to grow rich from trade with the
recovered colony of Brazil. Still enough remains to show that these old
romanesque churches differed in no very striking way from the general
romanesque introduced into Northern Spain from France, except that as a
rule they were smaller and ruder, and were but seldom vaulted.

That these early churches should be rude is not surprising. They are
built of hard grey granite. When they were built the land was still
liable to incursions, and raids from the south, such as the famous foray
of Almansor, who harried and burned the whole land not sparing even the
shrine of Santiago far north in Galicia. Their builders were still
little more than a race of hardy soldiers with no great skill in the
working of stone. Only towards the end of the twelfth century, long
after the border had been advanced beyond the Mondego and after Coimbra
had become the capital of a new county, did the greater security as well
as the very fine limestone of the lower Mondego valley make it possible
for churches to be built at Coimbra which show a marked advance in
construction as well as in elaboration of detail. Between the Mondego
and the Tagus there are only four or five churches which can be called
romanesque, and south of the Tagus only the cathedral of Evora, begun
about 1186 and consecrated some eighteen years later, is romanesque,
constructively at least, though all its arches have become pointed.

But to return north to Entre Minho-e-Douro, where the oldest and most
numerous romanesque churches exist and where three types may be