 Geography
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Although
many of the old buildings outside the historical walls in Chaves have
been demolished to make way for apartment blocks—some of them because
they were literally falling down--
the medieval quarter, with its Straight Street—something every
Portuguese small town had—and São Antonio Street have been declared a
protected zone. Here we can
find small, narrow houses, with several floors to take advantage of the
reduced interior space. The
medieval town was very small because the walls limited it.
It had only four or five hundred inhabitants when João I in 1386
conquered it: a fact that
surprised the king. Outside
the walls, there was not one house; only fields.
This was necessary because of the frontier location of the town
and the imminent risk of invasion.
The streets were very narrow.
Straight Street (it wasn’t straight at all but direct), the
most important, crossed the village from end to end.
It was known by this name because it was the “straight “ way
between the two main gates of the fortress.
 To
take maximum advantage of the limited space it was customary to build
balconies on the first floor, which came out over the street.
The balcony on the second floor then extended over that on the
first, and so on. At the
top the houses almost touched,
leaving most of the street covered from rain or sun.
The balconies were of pine or oak.
On the upper floors there were residences and on the lower floors
there were shops and small factories.
If we walk along the
Rua Direita we
can still see some of these varandas.
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