Stay at the windmill - a cosy autumn idea.
Updated: 8 hours ago
Portugal · a former windmill
What is it like to stay in a windmill? In Portugal, a former one is let on Airbnb: a white tower under the pines, a door framed in stone.
The most common Portuguese windmill is a fixed tower of stone. Only the roof turned: the cap, capelo, brought the triangular cloth sails round into the wind. Around Lisbon, the towers were built more cylindrical, of stone and lime. A study of Portuguese windmills puts it plainly: "The walls are very thick, which reduces the space inside." Wooden stairs made the most of what was left.
A database of mills lists about 1,900 windmills in mainland Portugal, most of them near the coast, many around Lisbon. When grain began to be milled industrially, they were abandoned, and a large part fell into ruin. Some of those still standing have become holiday houses.
A house made from a mill keeps the mill's shape. The walls curve, and the stairs follow them. The windows sit deep in the wall, behind wide stone sills. Downstairs the ceiling is low, on heavy beams, over large stone slabs; in the taller mills of the region, a very low storey, the soto, lay under the milling floor. Above, a wooden gallery and stairs rise under the roof timbers.
A mill ground grain between two stones: the runner, which turned, and the bed stone, which stayed still. Here two millstones are set into the terracotta floor, and neither turns. A wooden pitchfork hangs by a stone sink. The house does not hide what it was.
Why late autumn? Summer sends people outdoors; this house is about the inside. Lime, which binds the stone, is slow to warm and slow to cool. By late November the sun sets at about a quarter past five, and the evenings are long. The fire becomes their centre, with pine cones on the mantel; the pines stand all round the house.
A miller kept no set hours: the wind decided. One miller, filmed by Portuguese television in 1976, recalls often working through the night because the wind was so uneven. A couple of nights here run on another clock too: dark early, the fire, the weather on the far side of a thick wall. That is the point of going in late autumn: the house sets the pace, and there is time to follow it. What is worth keeping from it: warmth can come from what a house is made of - stone, lime, wood - not only from what is put in it.
Built to catch the wind, it is now a place to sit out of it.
Sources: Mariana Cardoso da Silva, Os Moinhos de Vento Portugueses na Contemporaneidade, University of Porto, 2022, after Fernando Galhano, Moinhos e Azenhas de Portugal, 1978; RTP, Moinhos de Vento, 1976; sunset: US Naval Observatory. Photographs: MYT'.
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