Marvão comes in at first position as it dominated our view for four months. Perched on a rock overlooking the golden Alentejo plains, this walled, Moorish town near the border with Spain is as stunning up close as it is from a distance. […]
Where is Portugal’s Costa Vicentina? It seems like a simple question. But the answer isn’t as simple as you might expect. This week, whilst pulling together images for an article we’re writing about hiking in […]
Like a living barometer, you don’t need a calendar here on the farm to tell you when the seasons are changing, the animals do that for you … […]
One such article on Portuguese website Portugaldenorteaasul, titled 11 things tourists should never do in Portugal hooked me in. After three years of getting to know Portugal, I wondered how these ‘things not to do’ would compare with our experiences. […]
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… […]
In these open hills there are no other people, most folk wouldn’t dream of walking when temperatures are predicted to hit the upper 30s, but there is an abundance of life. Ignoring us as we sit in the meagre shade of a human-sized cairn are wild Garrano horses. […]
Less than 24 hours later and I wish we’d bought more at the Alentejo supermarket. The madness we’d been reading about in British press reports descends on Portugal. There are queues of shoppers at each till, their trolleys piled high with produce including, of course, multi-packs of toilet paper. […]
Ask me two years ago what visions the word Alentejo formed in my mind and my immediate answer would have been vast golden plains; a landscape devoid of people save for a handful of settlements, […]
The first time we encountered a couvert was in Porto when it a waiter brought a tray of small dishes to our table. We weren’t sure if they were a complimentary amuse-bouche or we’d have to pay. […]
The season has changed. This hit home on Friday in the supermarket where there was a distinctly different vibe. People were dressed in full on summer uniform. There were telling empty places on the shelves where boxes of Sagres beer and sacks of BBQ briquettes should be. […]
A wee bit of research uncovered it was a competition which had been held every year since 2007, each year involving a different aspect of Portugal’s many natural and human-made attractions. It was like finding a direct insight into a ‘best of’ the country as known by residents. […]
It’s not that Arrábida Natural Park is a secret; Portuguese holidaymakers know all about it. But, apart from a handful of more inquisitive travellers, other nationalities are generally conspicuous by their absence. […]
After 14 years in the Canary Islands we already knew about the important difference between Britain’s centrally heated houses and ones in (mostly) warmer climes with little or no heating. But we still weren’t prepared for the temperature drop between the Canaries and central Portugal. […]
There are countries where finding something with a local flavour (no international fast food franchises allowed) to satisfy this yen can be problematic. Portugal isn’t one of them. […]
I’m currently engrossed in ‘Conquerors – How Portugal Forged the First Global Empire’. It is an enthralling account of Portugal’s thirst for discovery, and riches. As the pages turn I jump between open-mouthed admiration of […]
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