The embers crackle in the stone oven, smoke rises through the old chimney and the door squeaks.
An older woman with a short chestnut haircut and prominent front teeth peers curiously through the gap.
She asks shyly, "I didn't want to disturb you, but are you baking?"
Five minutes later, she's sitting on an old chair, a sandwich in her hand, her high-pitched voice spreading across the room.
"It's always like that with her," says Raquel Lucas and continues kneading the dough.
»Lurdes is so shy at first, but none of this would exist without her.«
More than three decades of age difference separate the two women.
They are campaigners to ensure that the mountain village of Aigra Nova does not die.
A trio actually, the third, Lurdes Lopes, is taking care of a large jar of homemade tomato jam next door.
The wooded region in the hinterland of Coimbra is beautiful, but increasingly deserted.
There are now villages that actually only exist on the map.
The young flee in search of work, the old die.
This is the case in many rural areas.
But nowhere in Western Europe is the population shrinking as quickly as here in the heart of Portugal.
In the past hundred years, the population has fallen by two-thirds.
With people disappearing, their traditions, memories and stories too.
Almost 20 years ago, some locals decided to buck this trend.
The small association “Lousitânea – Liga de Amigos da Serra da Lousã”, the Association of Friends of the Lousã Mountains, initially took care of hikes and festivals.
It soon became a rescue program for an entire region, a mixture of local history association and tourist promotion, with money from surrounding communities and the EU.
Lurdes Lopes and Raquel Lucas work for the association, they run a village shop, take care of guests, a small museum and organize tours and events.
Lurdes didn't want to save anything when she moved back here with her husband.
She wanted to go back to her goats.
"Actually, he wanted to," she corrects and silently pushes her lower jaw forward.
He died in March, followed shortly afterwards by her mother and an aunt.
Since then, Lurdes has been the last permanent resident of Aigra Nova.
She and her husband lived with their sons down in the valley for a long time.
He was a truck driver, she was a housewife.
When he retired, they came back.
However, the 67-year-old doesn't want to know anything about the end of the village, and it would be quite right for her not to make the loneliness a big issue either, because it's not that bad, she says, and who knows who is reading this text.
Hence only the first name.
A permanent resident, two employees and summer guests - can a village survive like this?
Lurdes, the younger, says again in the kitchen that of course old people are the heart of the community.
The heart of the story, the basis for all of this.
For example, the older Lurdes' husband showed the others how to carve masks out of cork bark.
They used to run through the village in spring to celebrate the end of winter and get rid of the cold.
"Chasing away the spirits," adds his widow.
Today this tradition exists again, without the ancients it would no longer be known.
But even more important, says Raquel Lucas, are the guests, curious visitors.
Some of them live here for several months, others keep coming back.
The renovated apartments in otherwise empty houses can be rented online.
Two Dutchmen and one American are visiting.
"All you can say is hello and thank you," says old Lurdes, "but that's actually enough for me.
I could always go back to the city if I wanted to.
But there I would be alone among many.
Here I am in the company of few.«
The foreign visitors who come up here to the village live very closely with the three women.
Cooking is an important part of our work, says Raquel, pointing to the dough.
Home, as one quickly understands, is often not just a place, but also food.
Food can be shared - if you look at it that way, Aigra Nova is still a very lively place.
The fresh bread with a little chouriço in the dough is made according to an old recipe, the tomato jam is a regional delicacy.
It tastes sweet and savory at the same time, very creamy.
They're just baking finger-thick goat's milk biscuits, the next day an Israeli family announced their arrival.
After the Portuguese traveled the world for centuries, the world is now coming to them.
The concept seems to be working for Aigra Nova.
In the meantime, the village has become a small model that is praised internationally at tourism fairs.
A few neighboring slate villages were also revived in this way, all of which have the same building style and the same problems in common.
Each place now has a slightly different focus, culture, handicrafts, hiking.
The Portuguese football club Benfica Lisbon is now sponsoring the reforestation of the long-neglected forests around the village.
This is also one of the tasks of Lurdes Lopes and Raquel Lucas, they take care of the seedlings every day in a small, somewhat overgrown garden.
Volunteers pay ten euros a year to be allowed to plant a tree here themselves.
The partnership with Benfica promotes nature conservation, but above all the exchange.
Many school children, who would otherwise have little interest, suddenly come to the hinterland of their homeland.
Of course there are also difficulties, in winter the wind whistles bitterly through the streets.
Despite all the success, Aigra Nova is still a lonely little mountain village.
Perhaps, as in many other countries, it could have simply been dismantled, loaded onto trucks and reassembled in an open-air museum near a large city.
For a small entrance fee, visitors could then read on boards how the life of Lurdes and her ancestors was once like.
Perhaps museum educators would bake bread from time to time.
But do you want that?
The Association of Friends of the Lousã Mountains has chosen the opposite path, leaving the village where it is, inviting its former residents and those who are interested to come along.
There are now some hiking boards, the village shop, new lanterns and a wider road.
In one of the uninhabited slate houses is a simple museum.
But most of it, say the three women, is still passed on here verbally, while baking bread or drinking schnapps.
Maybe also at the pasture with the 16 goats of Lurdes.
The 67-year-old says, thinking for a moment, that even the club will not be able to remedy the lack of doctors in a village with one permanent resident.
'But what's that a problem, given the good life here?
I still have the years that I have, and I want to spend them here.« Maybe a few former residents will come when they retire.
"As long as there is interest in Aigra Nova, the village will live on," says Raquel Lucas, and the two Lurdes nod.
You seem happy.
This contribution is part of the Global Society project
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