A week or so ago I added a post about decorated electricity supply boxes. This was a clever double box with a map of the Algarve region…
More of my Favourite Boxes, click on an image to scroll through the Gallery…
Astonishing how successful this is in preventing graffiti and to illustrate the point here is one that they missed…
Posted in Arts and Crafts, Beaches, Childhood, Europe, History, Literature, Portugal, Postcards, Travel, World Heritage
Tagged Albufeira, Algarve, Burgau, Carvoeiro, Portimão, Sagres. Algarve, Silves
When you need a map, a beach towel can be an option…
I snapped this one in a sea front shop in Carvoeiro.
Posted in Arts and Crafts, Beaches, Europe, History, Literature, Natural Environment, Portugal, Travel, World Heritage
Tagged Burgau Algarve, Carvoeiro, Faro, Postcards, Sagres, Silves
We left Carvoeivo quite soon after breakfast. We didn’t have a long journey ahead of us but we planned to stop a few times. I had liked Carvoeivo, I wasn’t disappointed by the changes in the last thirty-five years but I was ready to move on.
The route took us past the busy cities of Portimão and Lagos but we stopped at neither pushing on instead to the resort town of Praia da Luz. This is another in the string of old fishing villages that have turned to tourism to replace the tuna but what marks this one out is the incredible story of Madeleine McCann and it has become notoriously famous for the location of the alleged abduction and where a few English detectives, who probably can’t believe their luck at being assigned to the case, now spend their time on permanent vacation inventing new, ever improbable, leads that keeps them permanently sunning themselves at the expense to the UK tax payer. Every year when the funding is about to stop they come up with another unlikely lead which keeps them going for another twelve months.
Nothing will ever come of these pointless investigations until the parents Kate and Gerry finally have the courage to confess what they really know. No one knows who is protecting them from justice or why?
It is an untidy sort of place with nothing really to commend it, I stayed there with my family in 1994 but it really wasn’t worth a revisit. I had high expectations of the next stop at the village of Burgau, I walked there from Luz twenty-five years ago and I remembered a dusty but charming fishing village with one shop and a single bar.
Then…
and now (same shop I note)…
It was inevitable of course that I would be disappointed and sure enough there are several more shops and bars, the fishing boats have gone and the beach is covered in sun-beds and parasols. We stayed for a while but declined to find somewhere for coffee and carried on driving west instead.
We should have skipped Praia da Luz and Burgau and visited the southernmost town of Sagres but we didn’t and I regret that and when we reached the far south-west we immediately turned north looking for a wild Atlantic beach. We were driving now alongside the Southwest Alentejo and Vicentine Coast Natural Park and although we knew there were unspoilt beaches there it was difficult to find a way down to them. I suppose this is the whole point of a protected area of land and coastline after all.
Eventually the road strayed close to the shoreline at a place called Bordeira so we left the main road and made our way through the dunes to a car park and a wide sandy beach. Every now and again we come across somewhere that has the WOW factor and this turned out to be a very special beach and when I get around to reviewing my top ten stretches of pebbles and sand then Bordeira is certain to squeeze in there.
We struggled across the soft surface of the dunes sinking ankle deep in the energy sapping sand until we reached a welcoming beach bar where we stopped for refreshment before walking some more close to the rough sea where surfers courageously rode the waves and then returning to the car and completing our journey to the seaside village of Odeceixa.
We arrived there about mid-afternoon and I was surprised just how many cars and camper vans were parked close to the beach. This place was very popular. We found the accommodation and lucky for us there was allocated parking.
I confess to being a little shocked, the room was in a local restaurant overlooking the beach, it was simple, it was basic, it needed decorating, it was remote and I immediately wondered if I had made a mistake and that three nights might be two too many.
After a walk to a local bar we spent the afternoon on the balcony of the room. There was no denying that this was an idyllic location overlooking a wide sand beach which was busy but not overcrowded. Almost all of the people on the sand and in the surf seemed to be families with young children and it seemed to me that everyone seemed to know how to look after it.
On the sand leave only footprints…
We allowed the afternoon to tip over into evening and we waited for the sunset to end when the burning sun dropped suddenly and finally into the sea, darkness fell and we enjoyed a fine meal in the restaurant, Kim had fish soup followed by Tuna steak and I had Algarve shrimps and grilled sardines. We had walked four miles today.
There was no modern air-conditioning system in the room so we slept with the windows open with the gentle sound of the sea and the tide as a lullaby which was much nicer than the monotone hum of an electric motor.
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
Lanzarote – Cueva de los Verde
Llechwedd Slate Caverns, Wales
Cuevas El Aguila in The Gredos Mountains
Posted in Beaches, Childhood, Europe, Food, History, Literature, Natural Environment, Portugal, Postcards, Travel, World Heritage
Tagged Algarve, Benagil Caves, Carvoeiro, Instagram, Secret Places, Social Media
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.
Posted in Cathedrals, Europe, History, Literature, Portugal, Postcards, Travel, World Heritage
Tagged Algarve, Carvoeiro, Moors in Spain, Silves Castle, Silves Portugal. Silves Doors
Some pictures from a previous visit to the Algarve in Portugal in 1986
Click on an image to scroll through the Gallery…
Posted in Beaches, Europe, History, Natural Environment, Portugal, Postcards, Travel, World Heritage
Tagged Albufeira, Alcantarilha, Algarve, Armação de Pera, Carvoeiro
“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…
Posted in Beaches, Europe, Food, Growing up in the 1950s, History, Literature, Natural Environment, Portugal, Postcards, Travel, World Heritage
Tagged Algarve, Carvoeiro, Culture, Life, Norman Lewis, Portugal Fishing, Voices of the Old Sea
We arrived at Faro airport as it was beginning to get dark and by pure chance managed to walk to our accommodation without making any serious mistakes. We settled in to our basic accommodation and the first thing that I remembered not to do was to change the time on my watch.
Normally travelling to Europe involves adding an hour on but not so Portugal because along with Ireland and Iceland, Portugal is the only other European country that shares Western European Time with the United Kingdom.
Looking at a map of European time zones this looks odd but there is an explanation. France, The Low Countries and Spain should sensibly be in the western zone but during World-War-Two the Nazi occupiers changed France, Belgium, Holland and Luxembourg to Central European time for the convenience of Adolf Hitler in Berlin. For the sake of consistency Nazi sympathiser Franco changed Spain at the same time but anti-German Salazar of Portugal stayed as they were.
I got caught out by this several years ago when I first visited Portugal. When we landed in Porto I instinctively added an hour and thought nothing of it. During the visit however something puzzled me because all of the clocks seemed to be an hour behind and even at the railway station the displays said four when our watches said five. I thought that this was strange so asked an official who confirmed that it was indeed four and smiled when I showed him my watch and suggested that it was five. It turns out that we had been an hour ahead of ourselves for almost two days and this explained why it was still light at half past six at night in January, why the restaurant staff were surprised when we turned up for dinner an hour early, why the breakfast room was empty at six in the morning and also why it was so cold when we went out sightseeing in the dark. This, let me tell you was a most disorientating experience and one thing is certain, I will never make a Time Lord!
For my first meal in Portugal I had imagined grilled sardines or piri-piri chicken but there was an absence of restaurants at the airport site so we had to settle for a burger and fries in a nearby American diner which I have to confess was really rather good.
The following morning I collected the hire car from the airport but there was a problem because I had made a mistake with the start date. Here I was making sure I had got the time right regarding the issue of the hour but I had somehow managed to be a complete twenty-four hours out on the car hire and I should have been there the day before to collect it.
Anyway, we sorted it out, the car was still there somewhere waiting for me and after the staff located it handed over the keys to a street scarred Peugeot 305 we were soon on our way heading west away from Faro.
I had visited the Algarve twice before, the first time in 1986 on a road-trip with pals and then in 1994 on a family holiday so I was curious to see if the southern Algarve was anything like I remembered it to be.
The first stop was Albufeira which once had a thriving fishing industry but sometime in the 1960s turned to tourism and began a hotel building programme to attract visitors from Northern Europe. I remembered sitting on the promenade drinking beer and looking over a beach where there was still some working fishing boats to see. There is no room for boats on the beach anymore because today it was completely covered in sun-beds and parasols and flanked by bars and tourist shops.
Actually I didn’t find that it changed a great deal except that it was so much busier than I remembered. We stayed for a while, walked through the shopping streets of the old town through the tunnel cut through the rocks for fishing boats that no longer use it and down to the beachfront. On the way out we stopped briefly for an excellent light lunch and then left and continued west towards our destination, the seaside resort of Carvoeiro where we would be staying for three days.
In 1986 I stayed in the small village of Alcantarilha which I remembered as a single street dusty little place with one shop. Not so any more as it has grown into a big holiday village and I quickly abandoned any thoughts of attempting to find the villa or the shop. The villa I know is still there because I know the people who live there but I imagine the old shop to be a modern supermarket – ALDI most likely.
This was the shop…
My plan was to drive through Armação de Pêra which in my memory was a pleasant fishing village with a big sandy beach but from the main road all I could see was a string of tall hotels and a sprawl of holiday accommodation so I abandoned that idea as well and drove on to Carvoeiro and hoped that this may not have changed too drastically since 1986. But of course it had…
Click on an image to scroll through the Gallery…
Posted in Age of Innocence, Beaches, Food, History, Portugal, Postcards, Travel, World Heritage
Tagged Alcantarilha, Algarve, Armação de Pera, Beaches, Car Hire Issues, Car Hire Portugal, Carvoeiro, Culture, European Time Zones, Faro, Life
“The ancient handsome litter of the sea front had possessed its own significance, its vivacity and its charm. A spirited collection of abandoned windlasses, the ribs of forgotten boats, the salt wasted, almost translucent gallows on which the fish had once been dried, the sand polished sculpture of half buried driftwood … was now abolished at a stroke” – Norman Lewis – ‘Voices of the Old Sea’
On Wednesday the weather was still excellent so we decided to drive west to the secluded beaches all along the coast on the way to Portimão.
First we drove to the pretty little fishing village of Carvoeiro, which was stunningly beautiful, especially when viewed from the hills on either side of the town, so we walked all around it and from the cliffs we admired the village layered with white-washed villas and buildings, undulating in perfect harmony with the natural rocky landscape.
The beach was small but sufficiently spacious when there aren’t many people about to share it with and it was fringed with shabby seaside cafés, inviting seafood restaurants and the homes of local fishermen whose colourful boats completed the picture postcard scene.
Before tourism this was a very small and intimate fishing village and in 1965 a foreign resident wrote about the place; “the mode of living remains essentially medieval”. Well, in 1986 it was a bit more modern than that but still very quaint and although I have never been back I understand that now, thirty years on, it has lost any resemblance whatsoever to its modest origins.
Leaving Carvoeiro we took the scenic coast road west that ran adjacent to the Atlantic Ocean along an orange ridge of rugged sandstone cliffs. All along the route there were beaches and secluded bays and after a short while we stopped at Praia Vale de Centianes, which from an elevated position looked totally idyllic in a Robinson Crusoe sort of way.
We parked the car by a stairway but found that about half way down it had been blocked off by someone who had wedged a fishing boat into a rocky entrance gorge that completely prevented people from passing. This wasn’t going to stop us however so we bypassed the obstruction by climbing down the cliff in a tricky little mountaineering manoeuvre before rejoining the steps, which wound endlessly down through the rocks until we reached an enclave surrounded on all sides by towering rocks. At the bottom was a perfectly secluded beach, which we had all to ourselves and we laid out our towels and lay in the warm November sun.
Not long afterwards we found out why the steps were closed because the tide started to rush in quite quickly and the troubled turbulent sea was being funnelled in by the cliffs on both sides, which had the disturbing effect of intensifying the power of the waves.
Obviously the beach was quite dangerous in winter and the boat blockade was there for a good reason, which was to prevent foolish people like us from going down there. The sea rushed in quite quickly so we gathered our possessions and made for the steps and by the time we had reached the boat the whole bay of previously golden sand was completely submerged. That was a a bit too close for comfort so we decided that we wouldn’t risk any more deserted beaches and returned instead for an afternoon at Armação de Pera where we shared a beach with local men attending to their fishing nets and getting ready for work.
This was to be our final night in Portugal before we set off on the drive home so tonight we drove to the nearby town of Silves for an evening meal. Silves was once the capital of the whole district that was still referred to as late as the nineteenth century as the “Kingdom of the Algarve” and standing proudly on a hill the thousand year old town is practically the last urban area before the mountains of southern Portugal rise up dramatically like an impenetrable wall behind it.
It was quiet tonight and didn’t look too promising until we found a pleasant little fish restaurant that was busy with local people and we interpreted this as a good sign. A man dining alone could see that we were having some difficulty with interpreting the impenetrable menu and he offered us assistance with what little English he possessed and based on his recommendation we enjoyed a very tasty traditional fish of the day meal.
After dinner we drove back to Villa Estrella and had more beer and at some point in the evening there came the point where we had had obviously far too much because we decided that we were enjoying ourselves so much, the weather was so much better than expected and Anthony couldn’t bear to leave without saying goodbye to the girls from Leeds so we foolishly agreed that we could probably manage the drive back in two days instead of three and we would rather like to have an extra day in Portugal.
Fuelled by excess alcohol, common sense was completely abandoned, thrown into a bonfire of insanity and although Tony claimed to be running short of Portuguese cash we calculated that between us we had enough Escudos to support us for the additional day. We were also encouraged because the map that we had, which to be fair was not an especially good one, suggested that the journey home was motorway all the way so this really shouldn’t be a problem at all! How naïve we were and we had no idea how much trouble was coming our way!
And that was how we came to abandon our carefully made plans and spend a fourth day on the Algarve. We drove again to Albufeira and Richard and I looked around the back streets once more and Anthony and Tony walked the entire length of the beaches, several times, looking for the girls from Leeds. In the afternoon we walked along a path on the top of the high cliffs to São João with spectacular views of the Atlantic Ocean, which was a brilliant blue under the strong winter sunshine.
Later we took up position at a table overlooking the beach and quite simply, just wasted the rest of the day away.
Anthony found the girls he was looking for and I think they were a bit surprised to see him on account of the fact that by about this time we should have been well on our way to Madrid. He arranged to meet them that evening and then we all returned to the villa to pack our bags so that we could get a good early start the next day.
We returned the empty bottles to the lady at the shop and again she invited us to buy as much bread as we liked and she looked rather disappointed when we explained, as best we could, that we were going home tomorrow so didn’t need any.
I felt bad about that and I have always wondered if she managed to sell the additional supplies that she had obviously bought in especially for us.
Have you ever recklessly changed your travel plans?
Posted in backpacking, Beaches, Europe, Food, History, Literature, Portugal, Postcards, Travel
Tagged Albufeira, Algarve, Beaches, Carvoeiro, Culture, Life, Photography, Praia Vale de Centianes, World Heritage Sites
On Wednesday the weather was still excellent so we decided to drive west to the secluded beaches all along the coast on the way to Portimão.
First we drove to the pretty little fishing village of Carvoeiro, which is beautiful, especially when viewed from the hills on either side of the town, so we walked all around it and from the cliffs we admired the village layered with white-washed villas and buildings, which seem to undulate in perfect harmony with the natural rocky landscape.
Have Bag, Will Travel 