About Cascata de Mourao
Cascata de Mourao (or Cascata de Mourão) consists of a couple of waterfalls on the Ribeira de Mourão Creek situated near the village of Anços (so it’s also called Cascata de Anços).
Of the waterfalls that I encountered here, the upper one featured a vertical drop of around 10-15m with a large plunge pool and lots of tree vegetation fringing the body of water.
The lower tier further downstream was much shorter as it went down a multi-tiered sloping shelf over a height of perhaps 3-5m or so.
According to a sign near the trailhead (see directions below), the valley containing this waterfall also happened to be inhabited by Moors before Christians took over.
In fact, the word “Mourão” apparently means “Moors”, and thus this would be the waterfall of Moors given that they were apparently one of the first inhabitants of this valley.
Conditions of Flow
Our visit to the Cascata de Mourão took place in early June 2024, which also happened to be a year where the Mediterranean countries seemed to be grappling with persistent drought.
So you can imagine my surprise when I managed to witness this waterfall still having a light but satisfactory flow.
As you can see from the photos above, this waterfall probably didn’t have too much life left as the Summer would progress without appreciable precipitation.
Thus, if I had to extrapolate from this limited sample size of observations, I’d say that Spring and early Summer would be the times to visit the Cascata de Mourao Waterfall.
These seasons seem to have the best of both worlds in terms of more stable, cooler weather without the extreme heat that European countries have been suffering from further exacerbated by Global Warming.
Of course, this time frame has to be caveated with how much precipitation fell during the course of its Winter season.
A disappointing Winter season (i.e. lack of precipitation) could reduce this limited time frame of visiting the Cascata de Mourao even more.
Accessing Cascata de Mourão
It appeared that Cascata de Mourao could be accessed from two different starting points.
The first one was near some fencing where there was signage in Portugese saying not to block that area to allow cars to turn around.
That limited parking even more because the area beyond that fencing was pretty much reserved for private driveways and local traffic passing through.
The hike from this starting point to the waterfalls comprising the Cascata de Mourão was on the order of about 1.4km round-trip.
The second starting point was at what appeared to be public street parking (though there was no signage or anything) situated by some residences belonging to the village of Anços.
Strangely enough, when I hiked to the waterfalls from the first starting point, I actually walked by this one-way street containing the unsigned street parking spaces.
The GPS apps like GoogleMaps actually misled us to the wrong side of this one-way street, which was why we didn’t start the hike in this manner.
Anyways, after the one-way street, the road then peaked before descending by some some signed trail junction deviating from the road (I encountered signage that pointed the way to “cascatas”).
I’ll provide more details of doing the longer version of this hike in the next section.
Overall, I spent a little over an hour away from the car to cover a distance of around 1.4km round-trip.
Note that the second starting point might shave off half of that overall distance (or 700m round-trip).
Cascata de Mourão Trail Description
Assuming I started from the further trailhead (i.e. the first starting point described above), I’d hike down along the Rua dos Moleiros.
Then, I kept right at the fork to continue along the Ribeira de Mourão on the Rua do Pego before crossing the creek to get onto the Rua do Rio.
Next, I followed the Rua das Cascatas in the wrong direction towards the Rua da Laranjeira, which then became unpaved after cresting near the end of someone’s farm or residence.
Shortly after the road started to descend, I encountered a signed trail veering to the left towards the Ribeira de Mourão again.
Going down this trail, it encountered forks in the trail, especially where the steps and some railings ended.
Going right at this fork, it eventually led a short distance downstream to the lower tier of the Cascata de Mourão and its 3-5m drop on a shelf that can be reached by a very narrow ledge.
Other trails continued further downstream along the Ribeira de Mourão towards some stream accesses, but I went no further down the trail.
Backtracing to the trail fork at the end of the railings, I then followed the leftmost path, which went upstream along the Ribeira de Mourão.
This path went by some gear-like remnants strewn about the trail next to what appeared to be the ruins of one of the mills described by the stone sign at the start of this hike.
Eventually, after a brief scrambling on the creek bed, I skirted by an intermediate cascade before doing some mild bouldering towards a large plunge pool fronting the upper tier of the Cascata de Mourão with its roughly 10-15m drop.
This was a serene spot that I’d imagine could be a nice swimming hole given the size of the plunge pool here.
I shared this place with one other early bird during my visit, but after having my fill of this spot, I saw at least a handful more people (seemingly Portugese-speaking locals) making their way to this waterfall.
Therefore, it can’t be as unknown and obscure as I would have thought.
I then backtracked the way I came to the parked car, where I wound up spending around 65 minutes away from the car to cover the roughly 1.4km round-trip distance.
Authorities
Cascata de Mourao is located in the village of Ancos near the town of Sintra in the Lisbon Region of Portugal. It is not clear if there’s an official governing body that presides over these waterfalls. However, it seems like local landowners and town officials from Ancos, Montelavar, or Sintra have been responsible for signs and trail infrastructure. For information or inquiries about the area as well as current conditions, you can try visiting the Sintra Tourism website.
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