As I am writing this, we are halfway through our four weeks in Penamacor, and, before you ask, no, we haven’t been anywhere or done anything yet other than dote on two-thirds of our grandsons and perform light household duties. (Can’t wait until Bernice reads that ‘light’.) As we never cease to explain, while Penamacor has its charms, it would not be our first choice of holiday destination, all other things being equal. However, since very few other things are equal, Penamacor is where we are, and, while the waterskiing leaves much to be desired, that’s not really what we’re here for.

Actually, it transpires that Penamacor and environs do offer a variety of attractions, particularly in the festival season, at the peak of which we appear to have arrived. Before we drove over the border from Madrid, a friend (who, clearly, does not know me at all) wrote to ask whether we would be attending the Boom festival. At the time, I had no idea what the Boom festival was. (My guess is that about 4% of you will be thinking: ‘Are you serious?’, 15% of you will be thinking: ‘No surprises there’, and the other 81% will be saying:’ What’s the Boom festival?’)

According to Wikipaedia (although I strongly suspect that anyone interested in the Boom Festival doesn’t look things up on Wikipaedia): it is ‘a transformational, multidisciplinary, psychedelic and sustainable festival that happens every two years in Portugal. Editions are in sync with the full moon. Born in 1997 in Herdade do Zambujal, Águas de Moura, Portugal as a goa trance psychedelic party, it has since then evolved into a global celebration of alternative culture.’ 41,000 people from 177 countries (third among which in number of attendees is, apparently, Israel) came this year to what is, by all accounts, a very well organised festival, with online ticket sales (sold out in 90 minutes), 21 official stages, 544 artists, 181 facilitators, 69 assistants and 100 therapists, and with art exhibitions, children’s activities and many other activities running throughout festival week. In addition, the festival has won several green festival international awards.

You can follow the link to find out more about this year’s festival.

Quite by chance, we almost crossed paths with the festival last week. The supermarket that the kids have started using since we were last here happens to be in the town – Idanha-A-Nova – on the outskirts of which the festival is held. This almost certainly explains the surprisingly large number of customers in the supermarket shopping in the organic food section and sporting a variety of tattoos and rasta hairstyles. It may also explain why this is the only supermarket in my experience whose car park features an open-air laundromat.

As if all of this excitement were not enough, the last few days have seen Penamacor come alive unexpectedly – at least, unexpectedly for us. The last week of July marks the local summer festival, promising all sorts of highlights. We became aware, on Thursday and Friday, that the village was filling up with visitors. People come for the last weekend in July from the coastal cities; some have bought second homes in the village; others have inherited their late parents’ houses, or are visiting their living parents. For the long weekend that they stay, the village takes on a new life.

Suddenly, our neighbours’ house came alive. Whenever we have visited before, it has been deserted. This weekend, two siblings and their families descended on it, in cars laden with equipment and supplies. They spent a few hours taming the back garden, and the next day barbecuing and attending the festival, before loading up their cars again and driving back to the big city this morning.

And what of the festival itself? Until today, our only direct experience of it was thumping music playing way into the small hours on Friday and Saturday night. (Fortunately for us, the open-air concerts are staged in a part of the village that the kids’ bedroom faces; in our bedroom, on the other side of the house, we could hear nothing – not that any concert half a mile away would keep either Bernice or me awake.) I must say, this seemed rather inappropriate for our sleepy corner of the country, but there is, we are beginning to notice, a younger population who, most of the time we are out and about are hidden away at work or school, and who come out just as we are crashing at what for us is the end of the day. Over the last week, we have seen many teenagers going to and from the municipal swimming pool, and playing football.

Today (Sunday) we decided to visit the festival, known as the ‘Lands of the Lynx’ fair, acknowledging that the national park a few kilometres from Penamacor is one of the natural habitats of the Iberian lynx, an endangered species. In 2015, the last known surviving wild lynx in Portugal was run over by a car. Since then, a programme of controlled release has been operating in a number of areas of Portugal, which is proving successful. There are currently over 100 animals that have been identified in the wild, consisting of 43 releases from captivity and 91 known births. Natural death, and some wild migration to Spain, has kept the net number in Portugal at a little over 100.

The fair was held in the small municipal park in the centre of the village – the Jardim da Republica – which boasts the village’s largest café, offering indoor and outdoor seating and liquid refreshment that was very welcome on a day that, when we arrived at 4:30, was nudging 39 centigrade. Around the park were arranged a number of very small marquees, each housing a display of very local produce – honey, cheeses, olive oil, sweets and liqueurs, reflecting the fact that the Portuguese have an incredibly sweet tooth. I was expecting the produce to have a very cottage kitchen home-made appearance, but in fact it was all packaged and labelled very commercially, less like an English village fair than a commercial farmer’s market.

In addition to the produce stalls there were some craft stalls, including one featuring the embroidery work that is traditional to the area (although Bernice detected that some of the items for sale were machine-embroidered, and there were some Disney characters featured there). There was also a medium-size inflatable bouncing castle (for any children who wanted to experience the equivalent of walking on red-hot coals), a face-painting stall, and a stall offering biscuits and craft work made by the children of the local forest school.

Wandering among the small crowd that had gathered were a number of costumed figures from Alice in Wonderland – the Mad Hatter, the White Rabbit and the Cheshire Cat – and an itinerant gardener accompanied by a ballerina flower. The gardener offered to water the children from his can (a welcome relief from the heat), and encouraged them to then open out their arms and grow.

Musical entertainment was provided by a strolling guitar and vocal quartet. They were dressed inexplicably as a bumblebee, a cow, a dalmatian and a cockerel. (Inexplicably to me, at least; perhaps there is a local fairy tale about four such animals, but I rather suspect those were the costumes left in the dressing-up chest when they arrived. It is just possible that the animals reflect the source of the agricultural produce for sale, but I’d like to think that did not include any dogs.)

Just as I was beginning to feel that this was all a little inauthentic, another musical trio arrived, which proved to be the real deal, even down to the traditional costume. This was a gaita de fole (literally bellows harmonica) trio, comprising bagpipes, snare drum and bass drum, who played traditional folk tunes. Such a trio has, for many centuries (at least since the 1200s) been an indispensable part of village life, playing at weddings, fairs and religious festivals. The tradition is particularly strong in the northern regions of Portugal, bordering Spain.

Apparently, the tradition died out in the second half of the 20th Century, giving way to recorded music, and was consciously revived just before the millennium, in an effort to keep folk customs alive. It is, however, possible, that the tradition never really died out in rural enclaves such as Penamacor.

My research indicates that what we saw was the authentic Portuguese gaita de fole, made from a goatskin, with carved wooden chanters and single drone. Interestingly, the bagpiper performing here did not use the drone (which creates a continuous higher-pitched note to fill out the sound), but only played the melody on a single chanter. You can get a sense of the sound from this clip of a concert.

After we had spent about an hour and a half at the festival, we slipped away just as the sound stage was being equipped with amps for the evening’s main attraction – a performance by Augusto Canário & Amigos. Canário, I hardly need tell you, is a very popular accordionist and singer. Judging by the age of the villagers who were arriving as we left, his appeal is primarily to a more mature audience than had been the case with the previous night’s DJ, but nevertheless we decided to give it a miss. There’s only so much local colour you can soak in at one sitting, particularly when the temperature is close to 40 and you still have 152 steps to climb to get home.

I thought this week you might like to see the mothers who gave birth to our wonderful grandchildren.