Dão, abundant vineyards among green fields, mountains and valleys, rivers and streams, meetings of voices, people, wills and wishes, generous lands and open souls.

Legends, tales and sayings, blessed lives, in the heart of Beira, crossing the Douro, almost reaching the coast, it is a land capable of supplying the most formidable gastronomy, as here nature is prodigious and endless. The goats climb the mountains, the cows roam the hills and all together we will soften the generosity of a pure land, capable of giving us the finest recipes and watering them with the most sensitive nectars.

Dão is an open window over this Portugal that has the best of its pantry in this part of Beira, decorated with genisteae, carqueja, red pine mushrooms, wild mushrooms and rosemary. Ancestral knowledge gathered by agile, rough and generous hands where there is bread and wine on the linen, it’s a day of pilgrimage, it’s a day of celebration, it’s a day of living and finding such a beautiful authenticity.

At the table and toasting to the sympathy, that here life runs to the taste of the calmness of time and the kitchen is a lady who shows all she has: colours, smells, flavours, aromas and tastes. Bring bread and hams, cheese and olives, tinkle with the Dão wine that goes so well with good cooking, contemplate the verdant terraces, villages and, from up high, the Sunday oven roasting. A plentiful table to celebrate customs and traditions, to feed the gluttonous, to seduce the curious. And open the salting-tub, bring bran and lamb, sausages and black pudding, sing the praises of the land, praise its fruits because Dão is the sun on the threshing-floor and rain on the turnip-root, that even spare ribs and sausages is made into a dish, a feast, a feast made into a delicacy.

Dão is this porch facing the Beira, pieces of so many geographies, immense Portugal where we marry the table, the head and the stomach because life is nothing more than a communion, of people with the land, the heritage nurtured, the gastronomy enriched, the cuisine tasted, the culture generous as the land can also be eaten, tasted, desired.

With the certainty that, in the Dão, there is everything.