Where the Chestnuts Grow

This full-day photography tour takes place in Parque Natural de Montesinho — one of Portugal's largest protected natural areas, covering 748 km² along the Spanish border in the northeastern region of Trás-os-Montes. Across the park, you'll move between mountain ranges, deep river valleys, oak and chestnut forests, upland meadows, and traditional stone villages, all within a single day's reach. You travel by 4x4 with António, exploring several locations chosen for their morning and late-afternoon light — when the landscape textures and colors are at their most photographable. Approaches vary across the day — macro for small natural details, wide-angle for sweeping landscapes, telephoto for wildlife at distance. Along the way, you move through centuries-old chestnut groves, follow rivers through schist and granite terrain, and pause in meadows still grazed by local cattle. Lunch is a picnic of local products, eaten in the landscape itself to keep photography time uninterrupted.

Montesinho is one of Europe's least-visited natural areas of its scale. It holds 80% of Portugal's mammal species, and together with adjacent Spanish protected areas, forms part of Meseta Ibérica Transboundary Biosphere Reserve. What this means for photography is rare: a single region offering mountain peaks, deep valleys cut by the Sabor, Maçãs and Baceiro rivers, ancient chestnut and pyrenean oak forests, upland meadows, traditional schist villages, and a range of wildlife — golden eagles, red and roe deer, otters, foxes, the elusive wolf — across landscapes that change every few kilometers. António makes time to work with your eye and technique, getting you to images you couldn't make on your own. He has lived inside the park since 2010 and knows its light, access points, and the people whose land you'll cross. You can experience it in all weather conditions — overcast, mist, rain, late afternoon light — because the landscape's most distinctive moments happen on days like these.

António Sá is a freelance photographer and journalist, working across travel, ethnography and nature with hundreds of articles published in the Portuguese and international press. His assignments have taken him to Borneo, Alaska, Iceland, Mongolia, China, Namibia, and across Portugal. In 2007 he led the National Geographic Channel project Portugal in Focus, a documentary on Portugal's UNESCO World Heritage sites. António also teaches photography workshops and leads photo tours.  Since 2010 António has lived in Lagomar, inside Parque Natural de Montesinho. He is a naturalist whose deep knowledge of the region's landscapes, ecology, and human communities has built relationships that give visitors access to places and people most travelers never reach on their own. From here, he guides visitors through the Trás-os-Montes region at the rhythm of the seasons — work he treats less as commerce than as a way to share a place he loves.

Bring your own photographic equipment: camera body, lenses (a range covering macro, wide-angle, and telephoto if possible), extra batteries, and memory cards with sufficient space for a full day of shooting. Wear clothing appropriate to the season. This area of Trás-os-Montes is known as Terra Fria (Cold Land) and weather changes quickly. Bring hiking boots for walking through forest and field terrain.