São Levitt

If you ride the easterly swell of the blue Atlantic you'll arrive, as the waves do, at a steep cliff of basalt and limestone. This salt-spattered cliff is gouged with dozens of small hand-made staircases that climb to the tiny fishing village of Ericeira. It's on Portugal's central coast and it's as romantic as a sonnet.

As they do every sunset — as they have done for as long as anyone here can remember — the sparrows are gathering in the branches of the trees that stretch over the plaza in the middle of town. They're swarming into the trees, flying in from all directions, swooping on invisible swings and stopping, suddenly, to stand on a branch and sing. So many of them are singing in this Hitchcock orchestra that it is deafening: a strange chorus of thousands. The trees are all quivering and the air smells of bird.

As I stand there in the middle of the plaza, listening to the racket, it seems odd that so many birds should congregate here. But the more birds come, the more likely other birds will come. People are doing the same thing, here in Ericeira.

If you listen, in some strange way it sounds like rain.

I'm sitting on a wooden bench in the plaza. Beneath my feet are small white blocks of limestone, each one about the size of a coffee cup, and all of them arranged in handmade patterns. Masons have spent lifetimes in this little village, smacking cubes of rock with hammers to turn the gritty ground into a smooth white grid. The tiles are occasionally arranged in a design. Around the outside of the plaza, just under the trees, is a long belt of black stones that frames the central plaza and the benches that line it. In the middle of the plaza is a mosaic of a five-masted Portuguese sailing ship. The stones are smooth and shiny and arranged in neat, tightly packed lines that give the entire town a clean, fresh look. It's been like this for hundreds of years and because it is built by hand —not by machine — it is valuable. (...subscribe to Tekka today!...)