Monteira is situated in the valley of the river Sótão at the point where it flows through more level agricultural land. Monteira is a picturesque village that still preserves its sense of community, and cultivates the fertile land in much the same way that it has done for centuries. There used to be many more oxen working in the fields, but today there are only two remaining.
The chapel in Monteira is dedicated to São Simão and is in the middle of the village surrounded by houses, with no square around it. Until three years ago the priest used to occasionally come to hold a mass, but this has now stopped. Nowadays the chapel is mostly used as a place of rest for the deceased, so that families and friends can come together to pay their last respects before the body is buried the next day.
There were four mills in the area: the mill of Casal da Ribeira, Moinha da Insua, Moinho das Feteiras and another mill on the other side of the bridge called the ‘Moinho do Constantino’. The lagar, where the olives were pressed, was in Vila Nova do Ceira. People that owned pine forest nearby used to rent the trees for resin collection to workers from the resin companies of Chã de Alvares or Arganil.
There is an old school in Monteira that also used to take children from the villages of Terras, Picarotos, Casal da Ribeira, Sacões and Lomba. The school closed about 15 years ago, when it became no longer permissible for a ‘Regente’ (someone without official qualifications) to teach. Now the children go to school at Vila Nova do Ceira.

Many people from this village, as from so many others, left to emigrate to Brazil or European countries, or to live in Lisbon.
We spoke to a woman and her brother from the village who told us a little about life here when they were young. She told us that when she was a young girl she used to walk with her mother to Lousã, Arganil or Poiares to buy sardines, petrol and soap. When they came back, they put the goods in baskets on their heads and went around the villages to sell them. There were four shoemakers in the village - they used to cut out rubber from tyres to use as soles for the shoes, or had wooden soles because that gave better insulation during the winter.
Monteira has always been a very close and friendly community. In this village even in these modern times people help each other with the harvest on their fields, and if somebody gets sick everybody comes to help. There used to be a tradition here and in neighbouring villages, at Carnival time, that all the secrets and rumours of the village from the past year were told, in the form of “cantar as pulhas” (joke songs) when someone would hide in the woods and broadcast all the gossip.
The villagers still gather together to peel the maize as in old times, when they used to play the traditional game associated with the dark corn cob – whoever found one had to kiss everybody – and a festa is still held after the peeling. At Christmas time, they used to make a fire in the village that they would dance around and jump over. There is a story that one time during the festa of S. João, when they carried out the tradition of hanging up a pot with a cat inside it over the fire, the cat escaped and ran inside a storehouse full of straw with its fur alight and set the house on fire.
The villagers used to make a lot of wine here for their private use and also for sale. They used the normal grapes and the morangueiro grapes (American grapevines) mixed. At one time the government decided that people could only have a certain number of grapevines and so officials came to the village and cut the other grapevines - fortunately they grew again.
In this area people talk about a fungus that use to grow on the rye plants, that they used to collect and sell to the pharmacy in Vila Nova do Ceira as long ago as 70 years past. (We think that this must have been ergot, that is used pharmaceutically as a remedy for post-natal haemorrhage.)