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Olá, and greetings from Luz on the Algarve!
We’ve spent the last week or so travelling down the west coast of Portugal to the Algarve. The journey has taken in some fantastic looking beaches, but they were a bit too windswept and pounded by the Atlantic to swim or sunbathe. We’ve seen a lot of surfers braving the cold water and huge swells to show off their skills though this week.
One lovely town we visited was Sesimbra which had a great Moorish castle overlooking it. The dog seemed particularly impressed with the Azulejo, the traditional Portuguese tile work in the church, as she went bounding in before we had a chance to stop her! Good job it was empty!
One evening we came to a road-block a mile or so from our overnight stop which meant a very long detour on a higher road through the Serra da Arrabida. This is a hilly area with fantastic views. One thing that keeps cropping up is the lack of tarmac on many roads; after a nice stretch of smooth road you can suddenly plough onto a gravel track, the dog’s water goes flying and things fly out of the fridge!
We crossed the Sado estuary by ferry at Setubal and headed south along a very windswept coastline. We stopped at Lagoa de Santo Andre, a huge lagoon separated from the sea by a large sandbank. At the campsite here we had our first wash day in about 3 weeks – big mistake! As the weather wasn’t great we ended up with damp socks and pants hanging around for days. Lesson learnt – don’t try to dry 3 loads of washing on the line in the back of the van.
At lunchtime on Sunday a huge crowd of people descended on the village. We headed to the beach and saw that a bulldozer was digging a channel between the lagoon and the sea. As we watched, a digger breached the sandbank and water quickly began emptying from the lagoon. We thought we might paddle across it later in the day. Have a look at the photos and you'll see why we couldn't!! The gap got wider throughout the afternoon and evening and that night the tide came in and started to refill the lagoon. We looked this up online and found that it’s an annual thing carried out for centuries to keep the waters of the lagoon fresh. This year was particularly exciting as the lagoon was the highest it had been for several years.
After another couple of nights we headed inland to escape the wild Atlantic wind for the last part of our journey to Sagres, on the western end of the Algarve. After a night high up in the hills near Monchique, where a begger/street artist swore at the dog in perfect English for reasons unknown, we drove up to Foia. This is the highest peak in the area so you get amazing views out across the Algarve and back up the west coast.
The Portuguese used to consider Sagres and Cabo de Sao Vicente to be the far end of the earth. It was here in the fifteenth century that Prince Henry the Navigator set up his school of navigation and great explorers such as Magellan, Pedro Alvares Cabral, and Vasco da Gama all studied here. Ships were launched each year to explore further, open up trade routes and build the Portuguese empire.
We’ve spent the last few days exploring the beautiful coastline from Sagres to Luz, with its stunning sandy beaches and calmer seas. The weather has been the best yet, with temperatures of up to 20 degrees, and we've also found the rest of the Brits – hundreds of them! The supermarkets are filled with very expensive British goodies and full English breakfasts are served at some of the cafes – a sign of things to come in the bigger resorts further east on the Algarve and in Spain!
