It’s the place we go to feel the weight slowly lift from our shoulders.

There is a valley, along which a tiny road winds, a road that connects a scattering of hamlets and little else. The surrounding mountains are covered by thick pine forests that give way to rounded summits, daubed with yellow patches of gorse.

In one of the hamlets there is a small stone cottage, its foundations hewn deep into the schist of the valley side. The bedrooms are downstairs, nestled into the ground, such that even during balmy summer evenings the air remains cool and still. We’ve been here 3 days now, and have seen only a few cars pass by.

A cobbled path winds its way down through the hamlet, past orange and lemon trees and eventually beneath a huge cork oak. Here the path steepens, and turns sharply onto a narrow bridge, high over an emerald green river.

Across a meadow, there are some stone steps next to an abandoned shack, leading down to smooth rocks and a swimming hole, where the water is so clear and crisp that if you swim beneath the surface you can see dozens of fish.

After swimming, we climb slowly back up through the hamlet to the cottage, for cold beer, sandwiches and a siesta.

There’s only one restaurant and it’s a 20 minute walk down the valley. It’s a trout farm. There’s no menu, you just sit down on wooden tables overlooking the pond. The owner brings out a plate of deep fried trout laced with garlic, bowls of beans, salad, potatoes, cheese, ham and a basket of bread.

When it’s time to leave, deeply full, the owner is asleep on a bench and his wife has to come out from the kitchen to wake him up, and he gives you a price for the meal, slightly different every time but always good value. On the walk home we pluck cherries from the trees that surround the pond.

The people here are shy at first, but there’s a shepherd in the hamlet who gave us a sack of potatoes grown on his land and who we discovered could talk for hours, while the owner of the cottage that we rented knocked on the door one afternoon with an old ice cream tub full to the brim with freshly picked strawberries.

The owner’s son is 17. He travels an hour and a half each way to go to school, where he has learnt excellent English. He plans to go to university in Lisbon next year. I asked him if we should spread the word far and wide about this hidden valley and he shook his head. He told us that the handful of residents here treasured the quiet, but enjoyed welcoming the few tourists who happened to pass through.

Tell a couple of your close friends he said. That will do.