Alentejo

Camel Spit & Cork Trees, a Year of Slow Travel Through Portugal

Our quest to find the ideal place to live, combined with missions to create Slow Travel holidays, took us from the honey-coloured coastline of the wilder side of the Algarve to the verdant valleys of the Minho in the north, and from living beside a smugglers’ trail in Alentejo’s ‘beyond the back of beyond’ border country to a small farm next to a cork forest in the Setúbal Peninsula… […]

Alentejo

Rock and Soul in Beja

I didn’t expect this. Covering almost all of the gable end of a house is a huge blue and red rooster made from discarded pieces of metal. Portugal seems to have a thing at the moment for oversized ‘rubbish’ animals. The rooster’s tail feathers block part of a window whilst a stray metal breast feather juts out over a door […]

Alentejo

It is simply Alentejo, not the new Tuscany

Driving through an endless savanna where mounds rather than hills rolled lazily toward infinity, a travel article I’d read in The Guardian a couple of years ago popped into my head. It was called ‘A foodie tour of Portugal’s Alentejo’ and claimed that Portugal’s largest region was being touted as the new Tuscany. […]

Alentejo

The marvel that is Marvao

Marvao, considered one of Portugal’s prettiest towns, lay virtually on our doorstep, around 10km and a 15 minute drive away. Yet after four weeks of living with it as a neighbour we knew we really ought to visit, we hadn’t done so. […]