There are currently thirty-six village ovens spread over thirty-five villages, still in operation. All the parishes in the municipality, except Boticas, have at least one village oven. These buildings are usually located away from the village centre, often isolated, and without houses around, as a way to prevent possible fires that could have originated there.
In some ovens the furnaces were divided into two smaller ones to consume less firewood.
In the past, only private ovens existed, and those who wanted to bake and didn't have an oven would ask whoever had one to let them. Although the owners didn't demand payment for the use, whoever asked was always in favour and had the moral obligation to pay in some way. Payment was usually made on working days, helping with the harvesting and threshing.
When almost every house in the villages baked in the people's oven, rules were established in order to organize its use. In almost every village in the county, where this community asset existed, there was the obligation to heat the oven, which went around the houses of the farmers of the village with means to fetch firewood. As, for example, happened in Alturas do Barroso, "Anyone who had a herd of cows to transport wood to heat the oven was obliged by custom to heat the oven". They were called "quentadors", and they were also responsible for marking the turn of the people who would cook after them.
In Vilarinho Seco this use still exists. Every fortnight a farmer, or whoever has cows or a tractor, heats the oven, rotating it among the houses in the village. In the past this obligation took about a year to go around the village, now it takes approximately eight months, because although there are about thirty houses inhabited in the village, only fifteen heat the oven.
when several people bake at the same time, marks are put on the dough so that the breads don't get mixed up.
Besides baking bread, the people's ovens are also used during festivals to make roasts, as in Valdegas, where at the time of the Divino Espírito Santo festival, people put the meat in the oven to roast, go to mass, and after the procession, pass by the oven to take the respective platter to lunch.
Whenever the oven bakes, the neighbours still gather there to chat, this is, in fact, one of the characteristics of the people's ovens, the conviviality, a tradition that is still maintained today.
