Between Rocks, Mist and Silence | Gerês Mountains Landscape

Hello Everyone :)

Beauty doesn't always reveal itself on sunny days. Sometimes, it is in the midst of the mist, the fine rain and the silence that nature shows itself in a more raw, more intense way — almost sacred. It was with this spirit that I set off, camera in hand, for another foray into the Peneda-Gerês National Park, in the north of Portugal, one of the most mountainous and impressive regions in the country.

The weather conditions did not promise much mercy, with heavy skies, intermittent rain and fog touching the peaks. But it was precisely this dramatic environment that ended up transforming the landscape into a true cinematic painting, a canvas where gray dominated, punctuated here and there by brushstrokes of persistent green.

The first thing that catches your attention in this region is the overwhelming presence of granite. They are authentic natural walls, with overlapping stone blocks as if some prehistoric giant had piled them there. Massive, irregular, fractured mountains that stretch across the horizon and disappear into the mist as if the world ended right there.

The gray tone of the rocks, damp from the rain, gains even more texture in the photographs, with cracks, lichens, moss, small trickles of water that run with that characteristic sound. It is a landscape of brute force, almost primitive, but strangely welcoming. We feel small, yes, but also part of something bigger, ancestral.

Despite the dominant gray, the green never disappears completely. It appears timidly between the cracks in the rocks, on the most sheltered slopes, in the resistant bushes that defy the wind and the altitude. This contrast between the gray granite and the sparse but stubborn green gives a unique expressiveness to the photographs. It's as if life is constantly claiming its place, even in the most inhospitable environments.

In one of the most impressive moments of the day, as I looked out over the mist-shrouded valley, I heard that unmistakable sound, the cry of an eagle. I lifted the lens and there it was, gliding in wide circles over the void, with an elegance that only large aerial predators have. The contrast of its dark body against the whitish background of the fog created an almost surreal image, which I was fortunately able to capture.

For a few minutes she described slow, meticulous movements, attentive to the ground, until suddenly she disappeared in a dizzying fall beyond my field of vision. It was one of those moments that reminds us that even when everything seems to stand still, wildlife continues its course, silently, with precision.

More than just a photo shoot, this day in Gerês was an immersion into a world of stone, shadow and mystery. Each image captured is a fragment of this experience, of the muffled sound of footsteps on wet earth, of the damp cold that sticks to the skin, of the absence of human noise. Here, the scenery speaks for itself and says it all.

This is not the kind of landscape that screams to be noticed. It is a landscape that whispers, that demands time and attention, that reveals itself little by little, like a well-kept secret. And that's perhaps why, even now, when I look back at the photos, I can still feel that silence.
Nature has these things, where even on a gray day, it can be absolutely luminous.

That´s all for today, Hope you like it :)

Thank you again for watching :)

Always remember:

Value your time, because every fraction counts, and the price of anything is the amount of life you trade for it.
May the memories of the travels be eternalized in the photographs, and may the photographs transport us back to the travels ;)