I chuckled at your request for a press article - part of the reason this corner of the country still has a lot of really old practices is that it’s remote, and the population is tiny. There’s no press out here, and according to the internet there is nothing here. The prime minister was meant to visit a nearby town last year, but cancelled on the day when he realised it would take 2hrs to do the last 40km. Until the 90’s, here was a day by road, minimum, from Porto - usually two, according to locals. Now it’s 2.5hrs. It’s so unvisited that a large ruined 15th c. castle on top of a hill thought long lost was only “discovered” in the 1980s. The locals still laugh about the government men coming and discovering what they already knew was there.
I can’t find anything about the bread - I’ve tried searching previously - it’s just a thing people do here, and always have. There’s a lot of that sort of thing, here. Thankfully there are some efforts going on to chronicle this stuff before the old folks all die - amateur historical society taking recordings etc. which is better than nothing, and I saunter about with a camera. They still have a forge in a nearby monastic village, powered by water-bellows - and it’s not a novelty, it’s where you go for scythes, machetes, etc. The watermills for grain worked until the 90’s, and were then abandoned - we live in one now.
The local breed is “Mirandese” - to be clear, most folks these days have abandoned the awkward old (usually on public land, wildcat) hillside groves, but the ones which are still worked, usually by elderly farmers, are donkey powered. The village near us, there are only three (actually, four now) donkeys, two of them work - but they all munch the pao de burro. Hunting and transhumance with dogs is also a big thing here, and I’m 99% sure it’s the same stuff I see shepherds giving their dogs.
Wikipedia has a bit on the breed: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burro_de_Miranda