At the edge of the abandoned village stands the small English cemetery, the resting place of the Cornish engineers, Welsh foremen, and British managers who came to run Mason & Barry's Alentejo operation. The headstones are in English — a small Protestant island in a Catholic country — and the inscriptions give a vivid sense of who came here: mining men from Cornwall and South Wales, some of whom died young, some of whom stayed for the rest of their lives.
The cemetery is open and unattended. It takes about fifteen minutes to walk through and read the stones. The contrast between these English graves and the bleached Alentejo landscape is quietly affecting.