Mértola is a town on a bend of the Guadiana with a church that used to be a mosque and still, if you stand in the right place, looks like one. It has perhaps a thousand people and a museum in every second building, because everywhere you dig here you find Rome.
I stayed an extra night because I couldn't finish the drawing. The town climbs the hill in steps, white and then whiter, and the river below it is so slow it looks like it's thinking. Boats sit on it without moving. Herons stand in it without moving. I sat above it without moving.
In the evening the only restaurant open served me a stew of black pork and something green from the hill, and the owner asked what I'd drawn and I showed her and she said 'that's my aunt's house' about a rectangle with a window in it. It was.
I've drawn Lisbon a thousand times. I've drawn Mértola once. I know which one I'd keep.
