Alentejo
Six of the best in Alcácer do Sal
Alcácer do Sal is one of those Alentejo towns that is a sight for sore eyes, yet remains hidden from the gaze of mass tourism. […]
Search Results for Porto
Food & drink
What foreigners think about British food
The other night we cooked one of our favourite Portuguese dishes, arroz de pato (duck rice). It’s a popular dish in Portugal, you can even try it at Lisbon’s Humberto Delgado Airport. Yet I rarely […]
Hiking
Levada walking on Madeira
Our introduction to walking on Madeira came as a punch-in-the-gut shock. We knew some routes on the Floating Garden of the Atlantic had become extremely popular at certain times of the year, but not the São Lourenço Peninsula. […]
Hiking
Walking in Peneda-Gerês National Park
The first thing I have to say is that, over the course of four years exploring and helping create Slow Travel holidays across the country, walking in Peneda-Gerês National Park gave us the best experiences […]
Picture This
The Wish You Were Here Travel Photographs
Whenever we head to any destination, I make a tick list of images I want. Sometimes I have a good idea of what the ‘I want to stand on that spot image’ is, at others it presents itself… […]
Europe
Things tourists should never do in Portugal
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. […]
Food & drink
Creative cuisine is working class art
My favourite part of the hotel was the kitchen, a volatile place where big personalities added expletives and threats to an air filled with the aroma of uninventive dishes destined for the unadventurous palates of coach excursionists from England. […]
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… […]
Food & drink
The problem with recommending restaurants
In the words of the great Jim Morrison, people are strange… or they can be when it comes to food. As well as having very contrasting likes and dislikes, folk have very personal foibles, all of which makes recommending restaurants somewhat of a lottery. […]
Douro
The best and worst of travel in 2019
Delivering training sessions about some of the destinations we’ve visited over the year prompts us to reflect on our experiences in a specific location; something which doesn’t always happen immediately after a trip as there’s nearly always somewhere else exciting to visit steaming toward us. […]
Europe
From Florence to fishermen’s jetties, 10 views of the year
The most valuable treasures, whatever form they take, don’t just fall at our feet. If they did there would have been no Indiana Jones, Lara Croft, or James Tiberius Kirk. We have to seek them out; to boldly go where, well, some others have gone before. […]
Europe
Electric scooters, the scourge of Lisbon
It’s effortless to hit a thumbs up on facebook, a retweet on Twitter and share posts which show others just how much we care about our planet. We can do it without expending any energy whatsoever. It’s easy to be an eco-warrior when you don’t need to leave the house. […]
Aveiro
Into the north, a Portuguese road trip
This was meant to showcase why Portugal is such a popular holiday destination. But not everything went exactly to plan. […]
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 […]
Europe
What is the couvert in Portugal?
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. […]