We’d hoped to drive to Faia Brava to walk ( and hopefully encounter wild horses) but dear recipient of this postcard, the world has changed. No one navigates by maps any longer and we declined GPS in our rental car (because we don’t know how to use it). Any maps we’ve found are profoundly useless. Nothing to scale, roads not shown. So instead we found ourselves on a little winding road to Chãs. Up, and up, and up: past a barn built of schist, its back wall the hill itself, past wild fig and changing vines, until we came to a little miradouro overlooking a wide beautiful plain surrounded by hills crowned with little villages. Above us, the bells of the Chãs church, or one anyway of the two in the village, rang for 3 pm. And it was time to return.
xxx
...Theresa Kishkan 
As a Geographer who has thrived on maps for 70 years, and can happily spend an evening with a UK Ordnance Survey Map, I appreciate your concern about the lack of printed maps. This troubles me so much that I recently dreamt I was in a hotel in China pleading for the desk staff to give me a map of the city. Of course, when they finally produced one it was all in Chinese so I couldn’t understand it! I can navigate, after consulting a 30 page manual or 9 year old child, use a GPS device but frequently it outdated or inaccurate. My car GPS shows me merrily driving across farmers fields and rivers, as it was programmed before the freeway was built. So I often pick up for a song (“Show me the way to go home”) printed maps at thrift stores, or print out maps off the Internet, or borrow them from the university library. I also appreciate printed maps, especially if I have annotated them, as souvenirs of my travels. I still have the one I used to hitch hike (with 115 rides) all around Canada and the USA, in 1963, and which led to my immigrating here.
Having said all this, as you are finding, there are rewards for getting lost!
John Marsh
John, I’m sure you must know Rachel Hewitt’s Map of a Nation, about the creation of the ordnance survey maps? I once explored part of Connemara using one, a series of revelations. If you give me your mailing address, I’d like to send you a book of mine with an essay about that time…