Access to Picote from:

- Miranda do Douro (± 18 km) – N221 following the signs to Picote.

At Picote, follow to fraga do Puio by a dirt road. GPS: 41.397435,-6.367453.

This is one of the best places to see the river canyon of the international Douro, carved in the Mirandese plateau, in granite (the cliffs are more than 200 m high). The Douro river route is determined by the fracturing (note the embedded meanders), there is even a fault here, which is denoted by the tight river curve, and extends to the north, where the tributary of the Douro flows. In the belvedere, note the granites of two micas (fine grain and medium grain porphyritic) and the cracks with pegmatites.

Other good places to see the river canyon of the Douro are the Sé (concatedral) of Miranda do Douro and the viewpoint of S. João das Arribas.

On a surface of only about 1 m², fraga do Puio has an interesting set of schematic figures made by wide pecking, where stands out the figure of an archer, known as the Puio’s Archer, made with the finest trace and which must have been done by abrasion with a pointed instrument. It is supposed to have been carved into the rock when hunting or archery would be needed for subsistence and having social and symbolic meaning. The importance of bow hunting (and fighting?) dates back to the time of the Upper Paleolithic period (about 12,000 BC), maintaining this relevance in northern Portugal until the end of the Chalcolithic period (about 2,000 BC). However, it was only present in the iconography of arches, archers and solar figures in a more recent period, between 5,000 and 2,000 BC (Neolithic and Chalcolithic) being this one is the most acceptable chronology for the Puio’s Archer. Findings of anthropomorphic materials and stelae indicate that the rocky spur, which includes Puio crag, was occupied for at least 4,000 BC, which is the chronological hypothesis that seems more correct.

Intrusive rock - rock derived from magma that invaded pre-existing rocks and cooled below the surface of the Earth, having crystals very visible. Granite and pegmatites are examples of intrusive rocks.

Pegmatite - extremely coarse-grained igneous rock with interlocking crystals, usually with a bulk chemical composition similar to granite, commonly with rare minerals and enriched in metals like lithium or fluorine.

Porphyritic granite – granite with large crystals of feldspar.