Penha Garcia, fossils and sport climbing, Portugal, 4K

Описание: #portugal
This walking tour takes place in Penha Garcia, a village known for the many fossils found there (trilobites), for the Castle built by the Knights Templar and as a reference for sport climbing, as it has several routes with different levels of difficulty.
Date: April 16, 2022.
Location: Penha Garcia, Idanha-a-Nova, Portugal - 283 km northeast of Lisbon.
GPS coordinates: 40.0431° N, 7.0158° W

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--------------- Video chapters:
0:00 Synthesis
0:36 Penha Garcia village
5:54 Penha Garcia Castle
10:21 Pônsul river valley 1
11:14 Sport climbing 1
12:07 Pônsul river valley 2
13:25 Sport climbing 2
14:25 Pônsul river valley 3
17:36 Fossils
18:41 Caster Mill
21:02 Pego river beach
22:40 Pônsul river valley 4

-------------- Places visited on this tour:

The village of Penha Garcia, in the municipality of Idanha-a-Nova, is unusually fertile in Roman and prehistoric remains. Its origins are lost in time.
The winding and steep streets present many interesting examples of the traditional architecture of the village, with houses built in the region's red stone, quartzite, some with very interesting details, such as the balconies and the lintels of the doors and windows.
In the center of the village remains the Pelourinho (pillory), dating from the reign of D. Sebastião, with an Ionic-cut capital, with the national coat of arms and five fleurs-de-lis, signed by its authors: Estevam Simão and Domingos Fernandes.
At the top of the hill is the mother church. The original temple was built in the 13th century by Dom Dinis, in honor of Santa Maria, having been completely rebuilt in the second half of the 20th century.
Further up is the Castle, from where you can enjoy an unforgettable landscape, with a privileged view over the deep valley of the Pônsul River, where the caster mills are located.
The Castle is believed to have been built by the Knights Templar on top of a Roman fortress that was preceded by a prehistoric hill fort.
In this valley of the Pônsul River, there is a geomonument where countless vestiges of what life was like in this place 480 million years ago, when these quartzite ridges were an immense sea. Times when the region was close to the South Pole and trilobites and their predators reigned, in an impressive world of aquatic biodiversity. Today it is the “cradle” of Naturtejo Geopark, the 1st Portuguese, of the UNESCO World Geoparks Network.
The paleontological site of Penha Garcia is known and studied since 1883, mostly because the ichnological record of the Armorican Quartzite Formation. The trace fossils are clearly dominant and make the site famous. Trace fossils can be understood, in its whole dimension, as: sedimentary structures, as result of the interaction between an organism and the substrate that keeps the memory of the event; of biological origin, by testifying behavioral responses of their organism producers to environmental stimuli; fossils, as dynamic snapshots of the daily life now preserved in rocks. So far 21 ichnogenera and 36 ichnospecies were found and that characterized the environmental facies of this stratigraphic sequence that can be found around the former supercontinent Gondwana. This fossil site is considered as worldwide reference for the group Cruziana rugosa by the wide diversity of behaviors determined, exceptional quality of preservation and exposure of the fossil record, sizes (varying between mm and the largest Cruziana known in the world fossil record), as well as a very rare attribution to a producer (Asaphida trilobite) found together in the same fossil assemblages.