Every guide says the 25 Fontes is crowded, and every guide is right, from about ten in the morning onward. I've read the forum threads. What nobody says is that the car park at Rabaçal opens at dawn and the path doesn't care what time it is.
So: alarm at 5:40, coffee from the machine in the guesthouse, the road up through cloud. At the top the light comes in flat across the laurel forest and the levada is just a line of water with a path next to it and you, walking.
The waterfall at the end is the thing on the postcards. Fine. The thing I'll keep is the tunnel — a hundred metres of dark, a headtorch, water dripping, and on the other side a valley that hadn't been told anyone was coming.
By the time I came back down the path was a conveyor belt of people in new boots. I said bom dia to all of them. I'd earned it.
