Bring in the stones

Bring in the stones

October 16, 2020 0 By Claudia

Three massive stones on one truck. Each stone weighs about 10.000 kilo. They come from a quarry in the region. We are going to make a wall with them, between our plot and those of our neighbors. It will be a dam to prevent their terrain to slide into ours after heavy rain. We chose this option as it is a work of nature. Therefore it is not only more beautiful, but also cheaper than to build a concrete wall. However, we have 80 meters of wall to build up. This means many enormous trucks with three stones each that have to lower themselves very slowly and very carefully into this narrow road.

Dancing and lifting

Three brothers, Ricardo, Ruben and Ivan, are AML&filhos. They are dancing around on our plot with their excavator. They use the digging arm to move the machine smoothly on the slope. They swing around and replace the digger for a kind of fork. Then the excavator is located very closely to the truck to lift the stones. This is very scary! The excavator is shaking and nearly tilts to the side. The tires come loose from the ground on the back of the excavator, will it tilt?? But finally they succeed, stone after stone is lifted from the truck, truck after truck, until the middle of the terrain is filled up with 15 of these monster stones.

Jurassic world

When we look closer we find fossils in this beautiful piece of nature! Luis connects with the Geology department of the Univercity of Lisbon and finds a paleonthologist, Carlos Marques da Silva. He reacts as enthousiastic and provides a lot of information. Our stones were born in the Jurassic age, with dinosaurs, and date from 199,6 and 145,5 million years ago. ISomething tells me these stones will stay here for some time.