Travels in Portugal, A Wild River and A Cliff Top Walk in Odeceixa

The soft sound of the rolling sea, no longer a lullaby but now an alarm call, woke me early so once awake I dressed and quietly left the room for an early morning stroll.  I left Kim to sleep on.  The beach that was busy yesterday was deserted now and I felt like Robinson Crusoe as I walked across the pristine sand.  The tide had washed away all of the footprints.  No Man Friday.

To the north of the beach and across the Ribeira de Seixe there is a cliff top with views both north and south and it was our plan today to take the path to the top.  At breakfast the owner of the accommodation told us that we would have to wait for the tide to go out so that we would be able to cross the river.

I may have mentioned before that Kim can be rather impatient at times and she was not in the mood right now to accept the guidance and she didn’t want to wait for the water level go all the way down to paddling depth so ignoring the local advice from someone who had lived here all of his life and knew well the tides and the flow of the river and  at mid morning marched us off to the beach to find a suitable crossing place.  I thought that she was being rather optimistic but I said nothing, I find this is best, and she pointed out that there were people on the other side and they must surely have crossed the river somehow.  She chose to ignore the obvious fact that these people had either swum across or were already parked on the opposite side.

So we walked the length of the arc of the mouth of the river until Kim was satisfied that she had found a suitable crossing place.  In a previous life I am convinced that she would have been an explorer or the leader of a wagon train going west in America.  I wasn’t so confident but she sent me across first to test the depth and the current and after I had made a successful crossing she followed me over.

Once safely across and not having been swept out into the Atlantic Ocean we were no longer in the Algarve region because the Ribeira de Seixe marks the boundary with Alentejo, the largest region in all of Portugal.

We followed the path through a car park full of camper vans where people were sitting and enjoying the simple life and then continued to a steep path with shrubs and bushes on either side without flowers but with large deposits of tissue paper.  We wondered why this might be and came to the disagreeable conclusion that the bushes were the bathroom facilities for the camper-vanners simple life style.  We continued to climb but stuck to the middle of the path and watched carefully where we were treading.

A surprisingly short and easy stroll now took us to headland with magnificent views extending north and south and west over the sea as far as the horizon.  It had certainly been worth the effort.  We walked back the way that we had come across the cliff tops, through a pine forest, along the tissue trail and then once more across the river.

Having safely negotiated the river crossing for the second time we stopped now for refreshment at a busy bar near the beach and then continued our walking by turning in the opposite direction and headed south where thankfully there was no water to cross.

We walked for a mile or so but it soon became clear that there was little to see, the path stayed stubbornly away from the cliff tops and the views and the sand was soft and difficult to walk across in beach sandals so after a while we turned back and returned to the accommodation where after a swim in the sea we spent the rest of the day on the balcony enjoying the view over the Atlantic Ocean.

In the evening we dined again at the sea food restaurant.  Kim had Padron peppers and I had a tomato salad and then we shared a lobster, crab and prawn rice and I received instruction on how to crack a lobster claw from a helpful waiter.  It seems that you don’t just smash away at it because bits of flying shell can be a hazard to other diners and it has to be covered with a cloth before applying the hammer.  How was I to know, lobster is not a main ingredient of my regular diet.

We had walked seven and a half miles today.

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Thursday Doors, Odeceixa in Portugal

Odeceixe is a village in the northern part of the municipality of Aljezur, in the Portuguese Algarve, lying within the Nature Park of the Southwest Alentejo and Vincentine Coast. The village lies on the south bank of the Ribeira de Seixe, which at this point forms the border between the Algarve and Alentejo.

It has some very fine doors…

Thursday Doors is a weekly feature allowing door lovers to come together to admire and share their favourite door photos from around the world. Feel free to join in the fun by creating your own Thursday Doors post each week and then sharing your link in the comments’ on Norm’s site, anytime between Thursday morning and Saturday noon (North American Eastern Time).

Travels in Portugal, The Trouble With Social Media

We returned now to the coast with a plan to visit the beach at Benagil, quite close to Carvoeiro and try and find a sea cave that has recently become a popular tourist attraction.

As we set off we had no way of knowing just how popular and it turned out that finding it was not actually that difficult because it soon became clear that every other visitor to the Algarve had chosen the same day to do this.  Parking the car was impossible, getting onto the beach was a nightmare and the whole place was horribly over-commercialised with people pushing and shoving to book a place on an over-priced boat tour.

The Benagil cave is a wonderful natural wonder that has been destroyed by tourism. It is in many guide books as one of the top ten things to see in the Algarve. The problem with visiting somewhere that is very popular is that it is very popular. Even relatively recently this place was a secret known only to local fishermen and villagers, now it is an Instagram bucket-list destination.

Beautiful places have always been fashionable with visitors of course, but the rise of social media means that even the most hidden of hidden gems doesn’t remain so for long. And while in a bygone age visitors would flock to wonderful attractions simply to admire them, now these delights are merely the backdrop to the irritating selfie feeding thousands of social media pages as once secret places are discovered, revealed and overrun.

It is an issue that I struggle with, beautiful places shouldn’t be exclusive but people who visit in their thousands should surely pay more respect and try not to turn it into a Disney World experience.

This is the Benagil cave but we didn’t get to see inside…

… and the sad fact it would be most unlikely to see it like this because inside would be swarming with visitors off of the boats lining up to get close and get the selfie.

The Irish artist Patrick Swift lived for a while in Carvoeiro and in 1965 wrote an early travel guide to the Algarve.  He refers to Benagil only once and describes the place as remote and medieval with no roads in or out of the village, he makes no mention of the cave.  He makes it sound really nice.  Just like Norman Lewis in Catalonia at the same time he would be in for a shock if he saw it again today.  There is an ALDI supermarket close by now!

My blogging pal Gunta on her site ‘Movin On’ drew attention to this problem in a recent post – ‘Tourist Madness’ which is well worth a read.

At Benagil it is not just the place itself that is spoilt but here the local economy has been irreversibly changed and there is no going back – there are no fishing boats anymore because the fishermen have all abandoned the hard life of the sea, discarded their pots and nets and earn their living these days taking boat loads of people to visit the caves.  Tourists are easier to catch than tuna.  Guaranteed income.  Soft hands instead of callouses.  Regular hours instead of the night shift.

It was a shame not to visit the cave but there were plenty more along the coast which haven’t yet attracted the attention of the Instagrammers but I fear that it is only a matter of time.

So we returned to our accommodation in Carvoeiro where we spent what was left of the afternoon in the garden and around the swimming pool. This was our final night on the south Atlantic coast of the Algarve as tomorrow we were heading west so we did some souvenir shopping (pottery ladybird garden ornaments) and after a final walk to the beach, empty now except for a few hardy stragglers as the sun faded away and then choose a restaurant for evening meal. I had a salad and a cataplana, a sort of fish casserole and Kim had prawns followed by chicken kebab. We had walked seven miles today.

Not the Benagil cave but one close by…

Other Cave Stories:

Drogarati Cave and Blue Lagoon, Kephalonia

Altimira Caves, Spain

Blue Lagoon, Capri

Krakow, Wieliczka Salt Mine

Lanzarote – Cueva de los Verde

Cave Houses of Guadix

Llechwedd Slate Caverns, Wales

Cuevas El Aguila in The Gredos Mountains

 

Travels in Portugal, The Town of Silves

After a full day of no driving but plenty of walking today we returned to four wheels and planned a trip to the nearby town of Silves.  I had been there before of course so there were more comparisons to be made.

Silves was once a Moorish city, the capital of the Algarve and the most important city in all of what is now Portugal.  How the Moors must have loved life in Iberia, excellent weather (not as hot as North Africa), no deserts, plenty of fresh water, good fertile soil for crops and not nearly so many flies.

This idyllic lifestyle came to a sudden and abrupt end after the Reconquest when the Moors were forced to abandon their city after a brutal siege by Northern Crusaders.  In Spain and Portugal they celebrate the reconquest but in reality it was the replacement of a benevolent and progressive regime with a barbaric and medieval reversal of progress.

Without the Moors the city became neglected, the river silted up and the city went into a long period of decline.  This is something that always intrigues me, it is rather like the Roman Empire, great civilizations provide advancement in human development but Barbarians always come along and tear it down and set progress back several hundred years.  Rather like BREXIT in the United Kingdom right now.  It really frustrates me because we learn absolutely nothing from history.

What happened to the Ancient Egyptians, the Native Americans of USA, the  Classical Greeks, the Romans, they all showed great progress in human development and then they disappeared and the process was reversed.  What lies ahead for us I wonder?

To reach Silves there was a magnificent approach from the south as the road dropped into the lush green valley of the Rio Arade and then climbed through the ridges and boulders of the other side with all the time the magnificent spectacle of the red sandstone walls of the old Moorish castle undulating along the top of highest point with its defensive turrets thrusting magnificently into the sky above us.

This is what we had mostly come to see so we found a car park and made our way to the castle past the statue of Sancho I of Portugal and towards the main gate.  Interestingly Sancho seems to have been moved and relocated since my visit there twenty-five years before because from modern pictures he seems to be much closer to the entrance than I remember.

We went inside and were struck by the fact that the Portuguese hadn’t spent a lot of the renovation budget on basic health and safety.  The Castle was a disaster waiting to happen, with uneven surfaces, irregular steps and almost completely without handrails or safety barriers to prevent visitors accidentally slipping off of the high battlements and becoming a permanent addition to the rocky foundations below.

Except for making sure we didn’t get too close to the edge and fall over this didn’t really spoil the visit to the castle and we enjoyed an hour or so walking around the battlements and through the gardens, discovering interesting fragments of history and reading about the Moorish occupation and the eventual Portuguese reconquest.

Outside the castle we walked around the narrow streets and the pastel coloured houses with their elegant but rusting iron balconies and the window boxes overflowing with boiling geraniums, visited the cathedral and stopping frequently to admire the views and to conclude that Silves hadn’t changed a great deal in the intervening years since my first visit.

The storks were still there…

After a couple of hours we made our way back to the coast.

Thursday Doors, Silves in Portugal

Thursday Doors is a weekly feature allowing door lovers to come together to admire and share their favourite door photos from around the world. Feel free to join in the fun by creating your own Thursday Doors post each week and then sharing your link in the comments’ on Norm’s site, anytime between Thursday morning and Saturday noon (North American Eastern Time).

Travels in Portugal, A Bit of Nostalgia

Some pictures from a previous visit to the Algarve in Portugal in 1986

Click on an image to scroll through the Gallery…

Travels in Portugal, Carvoeiro from Fishing to Tourism

“By the end…it was clear that  spiritual and cultural isolation was at an end, overwhelmed by the great alien invasion from the North of money and freedoms.  It became the most visited tourist country in the World, and slowly, as the foreigners poured in, its identity was submerged, its life-style altered more in a single decade than in the previous century.”  –  Norman Lewis – ‘Voices of the Old Sea’.

In 1970 following the breakup of the Beatles, George Harrison released a solo album called “All Things Must Pass”. I remember that at the time there was much debate about whether this was a lament for a lost past or a celebration of future opportunity.  I suppose it all depends on your point of view.

When I first visited Carvoeiro in 1986 a single dusty road led to centre of the village and the beach front and on the sand itself was a curious metal structure and a circular sign advertising Nivea Cream.  There were wooden frames for drying fish but no sun beds or parasols, there were cafés for local people but no cocktail bars, there were fishing boats but no pedalos. Today, after only thirty years or so, there is a long tarmac road through modern holiday developments and hotels, tourist shops, restaurants and the inevitable ‘Irish Bar’.

I mentioned my previous visit to our host Isabella at our accommodation and with a theatrical sweep of the arm declared that all of the built up land all around was once open fields, she sounded sad about that but I am sure she wasn’t because now she has a thriving hotel business.

Once settled in we walked to the beach which was still busy in the late afternoon sunshine and then took a path away from the sand up past the holiday apartments and the bars and made our way to the top of the precarious cliffs, a route which took us past rows of abandoned fishermen’s houses that are destined sometime to be demolished and replaced with more modern apartments.

In this picture I have in the background the old fishermen’s houses today, run down and decrepit, by contrast in 1986 they are still occupied and there is a grand old house on the top of the cliff which is gone now.  The beach is bigger because the Council demolished some cliffs to get more sun bed space.  The black and white picture is about one hundred years ago and I do not feature in it!

This is a process that is inevitable, people can’t go on living in one hundred year old houses without basic modern facilities but it is still a shame to see their slow process through decay towards demise and eventual final collapse.  What I did find sad was the graffiti that was daubed on the walls and doors, such I shame I thought that people can’t let old buildings crumble and fall down with some sort of dignity.  No one would go into a care home and spray-paint an old person – would they?

At the very top I looked down on the crescent beach and the busy seafront behind it, it had certainly changed but not beyond recognition and I still liked it.  I thought about it this way; if I had not visited Carvoeiro thirty-five years ago then I would have known no difference.  Someone visiting for the first time today and returning in thirty-five years time might say ‘yes, it is lovely but you should have seen it in 2019, it was much better then’

Having walked west we now returned to the beach and after a short break set off in the opposite direction where a wooden boardwalk took us half a mile or so along a cliff top walk along sandstone cliffs sculptured into columns and caves by the erosion of the sea.  There was opportunity to take various steep paths down to the edge and explore the caverns and lagoons that had been carved out of the rocks, I made my way down into one of the caves where people were swimming but I declined to join them because the rocks were razor sharp and in just a few minutes my feet and knees were bleeding from several tiny cuts so we retired to a beach bar where I could attend to my injuries over a glass of beer.

After an afternoon beside the hotel swimming pool our thoughts turned to evening meal but before eating we returned to the beach to catch the sunset.  I remembered fishing boats on this beach but there were none here now, there are no fishing boats anymore because the fishermen have all abandoned the hard life of the sea and earn their living these days taking boat loads of people to visit the caves all along the coastline which at about €20 a person for a thirty minute boat ride I suspect is much more lucrative business.

“All Things Must Pass”.

We found a traditional sort of restaurant, Kim had spicy chicken piri-piri and I had mixed fish rice, a sort of risotto and with the food a jug of house wine and a beer, we had earned it, we had walked almost eleven miles today.

For an account of how tourism replaced fishing then read Norman Lewis – “Voices of the Old Sea”

Click on an image to scroll through the Gallery…