Where's Bertie? He's sitting on a football pitch (using the term very loosely - see photo later in the post) next to an Aire by the small village of Pereiro. Exact location: 37.4448, -7.58693.
Weather: Wall-to-wall sunshine. Maybe not quite as warm as yesterday but still very pleasant.
As I ran out in the direction that we had walked yesterday, I noted the things that we could do to entertain ourselves if we stayed an extra day in Alcoutim, such as a walk to take a look at the Praia Fluvial (river beach) and a visit to the castle. We could even take a boat over to Spain. But there are so many places to visit and so little time, so we stuck with last night's plan and moved on, although not before a visit to the little grocery store, which proved to be surprisingly cheap for a little village store (I am, of course, judging this on UK village Co-op/Spar standards, but the prices we paid were mainly on a par with a Portuguese Lidl).
€7.80 worth of groceries. I'm not sure what this snap says about our diet. In our defence, the available selection of vegetables was very limited. They went in more for pasta, of which they must have stocked at least a couple of dozen varieties.
The intention was to head straight back to Bertie with our purchases, but we were slightly waylaid by the magnetic attraction of a cake stall that had appeared in the street. The woman running it, who presumably also bakes the cakes, tried her best, in a mix of Portuguese and French, to get us to buy one of everything, but we held firm, for the sake of our health, with just these:
Prices were not displayed, but I suspected they were going to be reasonable - €1 each was the answer.
We only had one other errand to run before we left town: a visit to the service point at the other Aire, as the one at our parking area hasn't been commissioned. We walked past that Aire the last two days and I ran past it this morning, before we drove there. On none of those occasions was there a vehicle there. Why? Because, per a sign on the service point, as of 1 January this year a parking charge has been imposed.
To charge for parking (and/or for services) is not a bad idea at all. The main thing that Alcoutim perhaps didn't think through is the appropriate price level. Aires and campsites in Portugal tend to be cheap (our most recent pay-Aire was €5 including good wifi and use of a hot shower, plus the usual services). So, to charge 60c per square metre of vehicle, per day, just for a patch of grit car park looks very expensive, particularly when you see the size of most motorhomes out here. The second problem for Alcoutim is that there are two other places, both better located to walk into the village, where motorhomers can park for free, including the unfinished Aire, on the other side of the village. I wonder what will happen: will they revoke the charge, or start charging for the other locations?
With tanks filled and emptied, a slight backtrack took us to the road to Pereiro, where we arrived to find ourselves a little underwhelmed, as on first appearances, this Aire is in the middle of nothing. However, I was hungry enough to eat a scabby dog, so we were certainly stopping long enough for lunch.
The first task was choosing where to park. It was only later, on foot, that we discovered what must be the original, official motorhome parking area. Most people, however, are parked over the adjacent wasteland. We opted to pop Bertie onto the 'football pitch' - if you look carefully at the photo below, you'll see the goal posts at each end.
Bertie is second from left.
I wasn't feeling moved to walk the local Petite Randonée route this afternoon, but in looking at the map I did see that there was a village just a few hundred metres up the road, so we wandered there. An information sign at the entrance told us a little of its history, which is basically that it's been dying since the 1950s and there's not much industry or agriculture around here. Mid-afternoon isn't the best time to judge the liveliness of a place, but save for two chaps sitting chatting on a bench, we saw not a soul*. The only commerce we saw was a cafe.
A (pretty incomprehensible) sentence on the information sign made us detour to the church on our way back to Bertie, to see if we could make out what the information was trying to convey, but we were thwarted by a locked door.
Behind the Aire is a reservoir. Based on the witness marks on the dam and the surrounding land, it's very low on water just now.
(*Mick has pointed out to me that this is not true. We also saw, at a distance, two chaps (separately) having a wee in their gardens. One could thus claim based on today's statistics that 50% of the men seen in Portugal are weeing in public. It is possible that they don't have their own bathrooms. There is a public toilet/shower block in the village. Or maybe they just like the al fresco facilities.)
Weather: Wall-to-wall sunshine. Maybe not quite as warm as yesterday but still very pleasant.
As I ran out in the direction that we had walked yesterday, I noted the things that we could do to entertain ourselves if we stayed an extra day in Alcoutim, such as a walk to take a look at the Praia Fluvial (river beach) and a visit to the castle. We could even take a boat over to Spain. But there are so many places to visit and so little time, so we stuck with last night's plan and moved on, although not before a visit to the little grocery store, which proved to be surprisingly cheap for a little village store (I am, of course, judging this on UK village Co-op/Spar standards, but the prices we paid were mainly on a par with a Portuguese Lidl).
The intention was to head straight back to Bertie with our purchases, but we were slightly waylaid by the magnetic attraction of a cake stall that had appeared in the street. The woman running it, who presumably also bakes the cakes, tried her best, in a mix of Portuguese and French, to get us to buy one of everything, but we held firm, for the sake of our health, with just these:
We only had one other errand to run before we left town: a visit to the service point at the other Aire, as the one at our parking area hasn't been commissioned. We walked past that Aire the last two days and I ran past it this morning, before we drove there. On none of those occasions was there a vehicle there. Why? Because, per a sign on the service point, as of 1 January this year a parking charge has been imposed.
To charge for parking (and/or for services) is not a bad idea at all. The main thing that Alcoutim perhaps didn't think through is the appropriate price level. Aires and campsites in Portugal tend to be cheap (our most recent pay-Aire was €5 including good wifi and use of a hot shower, plus the usual services). So, to charge 60c per square metre of vehicle, per day, just for a patch of grit car park looks very expensive, particularly when you see the size of most motorhomes out here. The second problem for Alcoutim is that there are two other places, both better located to walk into the village, where motorhomers can park for free, including the unfinished Aire, on the other side of the village. I wonder what will happen: will they revoke the charge, or start charging for the other locations?
With tanks filled and emptied, a slight backtrack took us to the road to Pereiro, where we arrived to find ourselves a little underwhelmed, as on first appearances, this Aire is in the middle of nothing. However, I was hungry enough to eat a scabby dog, so we were certainly stopping long enough for lunch.
The first task was choosing where to park. It was only later, on foot, that we discovered what must be the original, official motorhome parking area. Most people, however, are parked over the adjacent wasteland. We opted to pop Bertie onto the 'football pitch' - if you look carefully at the photo below, you'll see the goal posts at each end.
I wasn't feeling moved to walk the local Petite Randonée route this afternoon, but in looking at the map I did see that there was a village just a few hundred metres up the road, so we wandered there. An information sign at the entrance told us a little of its history, which is basically that it's been dying since the 1950s and there's not much industry or agriculture around here. Mid-afternoon isn't the best time to judge the liveliness of a place, but save for two chaps sitting chatting on a bench, we saw not a soul*. The only commerce we saw was a cafe.
A (pretty incomprehensible) sentence on the information sign made us detour to the church on our way back to Bertie, to see if we could make out what the information was trying to convey, but we were thwarted by a locked door.
(*Mick has pointed out to me that this is not true. We also saw, at a distance, two chaps (separately) having a wee in their gardens. One could thus claim based on today's statistics that 50% of the men seen in Portugal are weeing in public. It is possible that they don't have their own bathrooms. There is a public toilet/shower block in the village. Or maybe they just like the al fresco facilities.)
No comments:
Post a Comment