Travel

On the Island of Madeira, a Tiny Town Celebrates the Chestnut

The American chestnut is a lost Appalachian treasure. Across the ocean, one Portuguese community holds close a relative of the bygone nut.

A woman in vibrant clothing stands atop a mound of flowers against a mountain background

Photo: 3kolory/ADOBE

A chestnut festival takes place each November in the village of Curral das Freiras in Madeira, Portugal.

The Portuguese word saudade expresses all the emotions mixed up with longing for place, people, the past, and things that may never return. Saudade—that feeling swept through me in Curral das Freiras, an interior valley on the Portuguese island of Madeira and a community defined by its isolation and principal crop, the chestnut. In the hamlet and on the surrounding steep slopes, I found chestnut reverence as I imagine it existed in Appalachia a century ago—in Western North Carolina where I camped every summer of my childhood and in the Tennessee mountains that produced my reserved, earnest grandfather.

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The American chestnut, of course, is functionally extinct, a victim of a blight introduced in 1904. Before that, Castanea dentata grew for forty million years in North America. It shaped ecosystems, enabled Native tribes to settle in place, fattened game and hogs, yielded railroad ties, and fed mountain people. By the 1940s, the blight had decimated some four billion chestnut trees—and a way of life—as chronicled in Donald Davis’s book The American Chestnut, which I read on a direct flight from JFK to Madeira.

Corkscrew roads delivered me from Madeira’s capital of Funchal to Eira do Serrado, a vista with a hotel, café, kitschy gift shop, and trailhead. With awe and aching, I watched mist roll over volcanic peaks as if they were the Great Smokies. Down below, carved by millennia of erosion and rockslides, lies Curral das Freiras. Until the 1950s, the only way out of the valley was to climb. I walked downhill, at first under the shade of chestnut trees. The valley walls amplified the trail’s music: Pollinators buzzed over blackberry blossoms, water trickled down a mountain face, a rooster cried out.

photo: Hemis/Alamy Stock Photo
Looking down into the village of Curral das Freiras.

“Curral is the end of the world, even for Madeirans,” Rita Rodrigues, a historian from the island’s Regional Directorate of Culture, later told me. Early in Madeira’s human history, enslaved workers and thieves hid out here. In the late fifteenth century, a landowner bequeathed the valley to the Convent of Santa Clara, whose nuns ran a farming operation from afar. The sisters resided in the larger city of Funchal and paid foremen to oversee production; poor settlers worked the land and forfeited much of their harvest for the privilege of a homestead. Once, in 1566, the sisters fled to the valley to escape a pirate’s raid, which is how it got its name. In Portuguese, freiras means nuns.

An hour and a half later, I beheld the snaking trail I had just descended from the terrace of Sabores do Curral. The restaurant serves cane syrup–drizzled chestnuts, a rustic chestnut soup with pork and sweet potatoes, chestnut-stuffed chicken, spiced chestnut cake, and custardy chestnut tartlets. Down the street, the owner of Vale das Freiras bottles sweet chestnut liqueur, its own kind of mountain hooch. From the café’s second floor, I accessed a small chestnut museum with artifacts of a working life: baskets into which men thrashed off chestnut skins, millstones for grinding chestnut flour, a chestnut roaster. Madeira’s earliest settlers brought the Castanea sativa variety with them to the island. It shares a common ancestor with the American chestnut, whose genetics split off soon before the two landmasses ripped apart.

photo: ACORN 1/Alamy Stock Photo
Fresh nuts ripen in their husks.

Each November, the town hosts a festival with every imaginable chestnut foodstuff. There’s a parade with a chestnut mascot, a tiara-topped chestnut queen, traditional dancers, and floats replete with chestnut branches. The rest of the year, it’s a sleepy village, best for a day visit as part of a longer stay in Madeira. Hike, lunch, visit the church with Santa Clara enshrined in stained glass. Locals dammed a stream to form a swimming hole known as Poço dos Chefes; I bathed with a school of rainbow trout and sunned on the rocky banks. There are a few home rentals nestled in the valley, but, like the nuns, I slept in Funchal (ensconced in the luxury of the Savoy Palace hotel).

As in the deepest hollers of Appalachia, poverty and deprivation shaped life here. Families supplemented their diets with chestnuts, as well as wild foods whose harvest the nuns did not demand. Virgínia Camacho grew up among twenty-seven siblings and half-siblings here. She showed me how her mother cooked pots of an endemic tuber called brigalhó over a wood fire, a salve for hunger. She pressed until I accepted cordial glassfuls of homemade ginja, or cherry liqueur. Camacho’s home is built into the mountain, and she led me to a shed perched over her downstairs hearth, where she dries chestnuts in autumn. When I asked if she knew any chestnut songs, she belted out a tune in twangy Portuguese, a joyous ode to the harvest.

Curral das Freiras’s remoteness preserved this folk culture—and most likely spared its chestnuts from disease. But in 2014, locals found that Asian chestnut gall wasps had invaded. Where leaves should sprout, adult wasps emerged instead. A common root fungus has also plagued trees, and Teresa Viera da Luz, a chestnut specialist from the Regional Directorate of Agriculture, says the cure for the latter must be applied tree by tree, many of which are too dangerous for her team or landowners of advanced age to access. The harvest, once a hundred tons annually, plummeted. Last year, the chestnut festival director imported 250 kilograms of nuts.

For decades, conservationists in the States have worked to breed a blight-resistant American chestnut. Hopes surrounding a genetically modified tree were dashed just this year when researchers found that it was vulnerable to fungus.

In Madeira, the Directorate of Agriculture has attacked the gall wasp by releasing a second parasitic wasp into the valley’s chestnut groves. It also launched a program to promote new plantings, farmer education, and better irrigation; Portugal will modernize the valley’s chestnut processing facility to diversify output. In a year’s time, Viera da Luz will know if they have eliminated the gall wasp. “Chestnuts,” she says, “cannot disappear.” 


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