/ PEVA
“Peva is the seat of my parish, a handful of houses sprawled around the main church (…) I nearly broke my jaw here jumping from chestnut roll to chestnut roll at Luís Rego's door, the carpenter, one day when leaving school.”
AQUILINO RIBEIRO, IN Sentimental Geography
Chapel of Santo Antão
Granaries
Community Oven
Main Church
HISTORY
Peva, an ancestral land, located at 800 m of altitude, is a place where you can contemplate in simplicity and silence the contrast between the aridity of the mountains and the green of the fertile meadows irrigated by the clear waters of the Paiva. Until 1834 it belonged to the extinct municipality of Pêra e Peva, from where it moved to the current municipality of Moimenta da Beira.
In its territory, inserted in the grandiose Couto de Leomil in medieval times, we find the magnificent sanctuary dedicated to Santo Antão, protector of livestock breeders and domestic and stable animals, with a typically Beira facade and surrounded by two churchyards: one for people and the other for animals. It is with great pomp and a large crowd that here, every year in January, the animals come to be blessed. On a platform below this temple, there would have been a prehistoric habitat, which pottery finds from the end of the Bronze Age have confirmed.
Of the religious and civil architecture, the mother church stands out, located in a small residential nucleus with very picturesque characteristics, the community oven, the various fountains and the three granite landmarks that mark the old ownership by the University of Coimbra, as well as the water mills of Tomadinha and the beautiful granaries. Added to these is an anthropomorphic tomb carved into the rock, quite deteriorated, from medieval times, in the Portela site.
In addition to possessing an important architectural heritage, Peva has some movable artistic examples of high value, namely a parish cross that oral tradition says belonged to Sendim, having been exchanged at a pilgrimage to Lapa.
“But, not everything, when eyes are cast from the peaks of the Nave, is drama. Beyond shines a gable: Santo Antão, advocate of domestic animals (…)”