This interactive book invites you to take a journey through time. The River Douro is the connecting theme throughout, a friendly river that is fruitful and gives structure; a river full of history, legend and poetry, that flows across five provinces in Castile & Leon, finding its end in the waters that beat in from the Atlantic. That is a distance of nearly 900 kms, following the pages of this unusual illustrated album, in which the voice and images take on a movement of their own.

Several lagoons crown the meeting point between two provinces at the top of the Urbión Peaks. Urbión lagoon is in La Rioja and in the province of Soria we have Negra and Helada lagoons; a little further on are the Larga and Culebra lagoons

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We join the first stretches of the Douro. Between pine forests, beech groves and oak woods, villages appear along the riverbanks: Duruelo de la Sierra, Covaleda, Salduero, Vinuesa, La Muedra, Garray…

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When Bécquer wrote El monte de las ánimas [The mountain of souls] in 1861 for El Contemporáneo newspaper, the photograph had only been recently invented. Until the 19th Century was well underway, photographic images could not be reproduced in the print press.

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Gormaz castle emerges like a stone flagship against the vastness of the horizon. From on high we can hear voices from the past.

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The Douro River winds a path through ever more fertile lands. Summer is coming to an end and the wineries are getting ready for the grape harvest.

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The sun is setting on Peñafiel. Its castle is now home to the Provincial Wine Museum, a symbol of the Ribera del Duero appellation for wine tourism. From up on high it looms over the valleys of the Douro, Duratón and Botijas rivers.

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We are nearly at the point where the Douro meets Portugal. Two monumental cities rise up on its banks, the water lapping against them: Toro and Zamora. The writer Suso de Toro came here to piece together forgotten recollections of his grandfather Faustino.

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«España está, en gran parte, todavía por descubrir y no menos en el aspecto pintoresco que en otros aspectos diversos». Miguel de Unamuno

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208 kms in all, between vineyards, the open sails of old flat-bottomed wine boats and the eternal light from the West that leads us to the river mouth.

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When you reach Barca d’Alva the vineyards line the way, adorning the winding slopes of the High Douro. We can already see them from the Spanish side, arranged in orderly rows. Here, where the heat becomes suffocating, the trunks of the vines have remained sturdy since time immemorial.

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A photograph of the construction of the Luís I bridge between 1881 and 1886 welcomes us to the city of Oporto. A reference of modernity spanning the beauty of an eternal Douro.

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