Thursday 7 March - Luz

Where's Bertie? He's still at the Aire in Luz. It's a much more popular place today, with 12 vans here, compared with 4 last night.

Weather: Sunny intervals until late afternoon, then showers.

There was no excuse for not springing out of bed when the alarm went off, but I didn't. In fact, I rolled over and went back to sleep for the best part of an hour. Even then I didn't get up, as Mick kindly made me breakfast in bed. It was a delightfully leisurely start to the day.

At eleven on the dot our day became more energetic as we headed out for a run on a pleasant route on little-used roads and tracks that took us through olive plantations. 

This afternoon we headed out again, this time at a walk, for a more comprehensive look around the village - not that it's a big place at all. 

What is our impression of this 'new' village? It's too uniform! I don't think we have been to any town or village in Portugal where there hasn't been a good smattering of abandoned houses, often with collapsed roofs, sometimes with just the facade remaining. Then, of course, in any normal village the houses will have been built in different styles at different times - often decades or centuries apart. Here all of the roads and houses were built at the same time (finished in 2002) and the houses are, at a glance, all the same. Every street contains terraces of single-storey, white-washed houses, with identically sized windows and identical roofs. You have to look closely to notice that some houses have two windows to the right of the front door, some have a garage, some have a chimney, etc. 

The other notable point is that so many of the houses look closed-up. Many places we've visited have been quieter than we would have expected, but with so few cars on the roads here it's difficult to say whether the population is made up of non-drivers who don't open their shutters during the day, whether the place is dying as a community, or whether holiday-homers have bought up the property.

  Beyond the village we found a raised wooden walkway and followed it. It stretched for half a mile, out to a docking pontoon on the reservoir.

Back from our walk, the sky was starting to look threatening, but I'd found some wifi outside of a civic building, so I grabbed the tablet and headed off to download some stuff. It was only as the first drops of rain started to hit me that I abandoned my endeavours (I'd had a productive time, mind!) and ran back to Bertie. Although cooler today than of late, it's been a nice temperature out when you're in the sun and out of the wind, but sitting still under an overcast sky (wearing shorts) in the square, I soon started to feel the cold. I was glad to find that Mick had the kettle on when I got back.

Finally for today, does anyone recall that a week last Saturday, at the farmer's market in Silves, we bought two rock-solid avocados that I said would take at least a week to ripen? Well they finally got there earlier this week; we ate the second one today:

We also finished the last of the 5kg of oranges today, which were undoubtedly the best oranges I've ever had. Not a single tart one amongst them, and all easy to peel. They'd probably only come off the tree on the morning we bought them. 

Wednesday 6 March - Luz

Where's Bertie? He's at an Aire in the village of Luz, on the east shore of the largest reservoir in Europe. It's free to stay here, with a free service point. Exact location: 38.34311, -7.37379.

Weather: Very wet and very windy morning, brightening and wind gradually lessening this afternoon.

With the wind rocking Bertie and lashing the rain into his flanks this morning, there was a limited inclination to do much. We did start to get ready for a walk across the road to the Information Centre at just after 10am, but we'd not even got our shoes on before another squall hit and we decided that coffee was a better idea. An hour later we tried again, and only got slightly wet as we discovered that the Information Centre is now a closed up building with rotting windows and doors. 

Having nothing much to do nearby was balanced out by feeling disinclined to do anything in that weather, so the decision was made to stay put. I finished my latest bit of knitting...

This one's for me.

...and cast on a jumper. It was just as I'd finished casting on (and before I'd checked my count) that a sudden rethink was had. Great chunks of blue sky had appeared and, even though it was still windy, there was no sign of rain nearby, so we decided to move on. 

We could have gone to either of our next two intended stopping points, but opted for Luz.  

We already knew a little of the background of the village when we arrived but this afternoon's visit to the Museum told us more.

Until 2002 the village of Luz (363 inhabitants at the time) was located 3km from where it is now. It's previous location is now underwater and with the buildings having been demolished before it was flooded, there's no chance of the church tower ever being seen in periods of drought. 

The new village of Luz is not a replica of the original, although the street layout is largely the same. The new houses were built and the residents moved into homes that, save for the few missing streets, gave the same neighbours as they'd had previously. That must have lessened the blow of having to move, but the documentary we watched on the subject featured mainly folk well into retirement age, many of whom had lived in Luz their entire lives, for whom the move was clearly a big wrench (even if for the greater good of providing irrigation water for the entire region). As the one older chap said: It's all very well giving him a new house, but he also had an allotment and mature fruit trees and even if he acquired land to plant more trees, at his age he wouldn't get to see them fruit.

The museum isn't very big, so we didn't expect it to take us long to look around. In fact, it was because of its small size that we decided to visit when we happened to be passing mid-afternoon today, rather than keeping with the original plan of going tomorrow. What we hadn't reckoned on was the documentary. I didn't time it, but it wasn't the usual 10-15 minute sort of feature one usually finds in a museum. It was, however, so interesting that it held us there until three minutes before the museum's closing time, when we thought we ought to leave.  

One thing that struck me during all of this is that, as far as any information we've seen has told us, Luz was the only village to be submerged in the making of the reservoir, which, if true, is quite incredible when you consider the water covers an area of 250 square kilometres.

We did form some initial opinions on the appearance of the new village today, but we did only see a little of it. We'll explore further tomorrow and report back... 

(Today's road-related aside: It seems to us that the roads going through towns and villages are in a worse state than the rural stretches (and some of those are bad). Is this a matter of where the funding comes from, we wonder - local authority versus national roads agency? Today on a section of cobbles through one town we agreed that the cobbles were smoother than the tarmac we had just left. The UK's roads are in a pretty bad state, and Belgium's rival those of the UK, but I don't think we've yet (in Western Europe) come across anywhere with so much road in such a state of uneveness as Portugal.)

Tuesday 5 March - Serpa, Moura and Barragem de Alqueva

Where's Bertie? He's in a car park at the marina (not that there are any boats here!) by the Alqueva Dam (exact locaton: 38.20083, -7.48725).

Weather: Light rain to start, then mainly overcast with a couple of showers. Getting breezy.

I'd barely got a foot out of the door for this morning's run when I came back in for a jacket. The rain was so light that I hadn't heard it, but it was of the sort that gets you surprisingly wet. 

Over breakfast it dried and brightened up, which was fortuitous, as I was determined to have a look around Serpa's old walled town and its castle whilst we were there. 

We're not timing ourselves well this week. We hit Lousal yesterday, when the museum we wanted to visit was closed, and today we discovered that Serpa is generally closed on a Tuesday. It was thus a quiet place, but we still got to appreciate: 

The aqueduct, added onto the top of the town walls late in the 17th century to provide water to the manor house:

The narrow cobbled streets of the old town:

The views from the castle walls:

As with most of Europe, they don't go in much for railings or health and safety in general. I shunned the staircase in the photo below in favour of one that wasn't quite so long, steep and uneven:

The thing that interested us the most about the castle was this substantial chunk of fallen masonary at the entrance:

Oh for an information sign telling us what it originally looked like and what had happened to have it end up like this! We got to see the damage from various angles (including from on top of the wall on the left in the snap above) and concluded that a tower that had fallen during the earthquake of 1755, with the lower piece on the right being the middle of the tower, and the upper bit on the right being the top of the tower, which now sits on its side. So interested were we that we visited the tiny archaeological museum inside of the castle, and then hunted out the tourist office in the hope of an answer, but apparently the town doesn't consider this interesting enough to mention. Wikipedia finally gave us the answer (which may or may not be true!) that a) we were indeed looking at a fallen tower; but b) it wasn't the earthquake that did it, but an explosion in the magazine store during the Spanish War of Succession.

 Mick looked pleased with elevenses!

It didn't take us very long to see everything we felt there was of interest to us in Serpa, so onwards we came, via a quick stop at an Intermarche in Moura to use their bizarrely secure service point:

One has to go into the store to obtain (at no charge) the huge wooden keyfob and chain, bearing the keys for each of the doors to the different elements of the service point. I can, perhaps, understand locking the tap away, but a locked uPVC door on the toilet disposal point?!

It wasn't long before we were negotiating the killer speed humps (at least the roads were smooth today!) on our way back out of town, for the final 15-minute drive to the southern end of the largest reservoir in Europe.

Lunch (a rather late one) was first on the agenda on arrival, and if it hadn't been for the threatening colour of the sky and the accompanying squally winds, we would likely have then gone straight out for a look around. As it went, it was knocking on for 1630 by the time I concluded that as all bar one shower had missed us we may as well go for a little stroll across the dam. That we did - and only got a little damp as we caught the edge of the next shower.

This photo doesn't do justice to the scale of this substantial piece of engineering:

It's a nice spot where we're parked...

Bertie is the one on the far right

...but other than the visitor centre across the road, there's not much to do here. My hopes of some waterside walking paths have been dashed. It therefore seems likely that we'll be on the move again tomorrow.

Monday 4 March - Lousal and Serpa

Where's Bertie? He's in the car park of the (closed) municipal swimming pool at Serpa (exact location: 37.939, -7.60495).

Weather: A bit of rain to start, then mainly overcast but with a bit of sun every now and then. 

What an interesting start to the day! We may not have been able to visit the museum, due to it being Monday, but the trail around the external parts of the old mine workings made our visit to Lousal worthwhile. A substantial distance of wooden boardwalk guides one around the remains of the open pit, via a number of information signs. Here are some snaps:

The green lagoon:

The red lagoon (which is only a couple of hundred metres away from the green lagoon):

The photo doesn't do justice to the pink hues in that rock. The variety of colours was impressive:

Perhaps a little too technical and detailed, as information signs aimed at the general public go...

The series of cascade pools and reed beds that have been installed to help deal with the environmental pollution caused by ground water running over the old mining area:

Yesterday afternoon, when we took our first quick stroll around, a stray dog joined us the moment we left Bertie and accompanied us for our entire walk. Today these two joined us for the final stages. They were very good - the little one walking perfectly to heel, with the big one a little ahead:

When we got back to Bertie, yesterday's dog was sitting on our neighbours door mat. It obviously knows what it needs to do to increase its chances of being fed (all of these dogs were grubby, but not skinny). A multi-lingual sign at the service point implored motorhomers not to abandon their dogs there, although I find it hard to believe it can be something that happens often.

What to do with the rest of a grey day? Laundry of course! That involved us driving about an hour and a half eastwards, not because there were no nearer laundry facilities, but because I'd identified, only a stone's throw from our onwards route, a parking spot in an interesting-sounding town, right next door to an Intermarche supermarket that has laundry facilities in its car park. 

With roads with great stretches that tested the firmess of our fillings (they're not potholed, but so uneven that it's as if the road laying method involved eight thousand people all coming along with a bucket full of tarmac each, dumping it on the road and tamping it down as best they could) we arrived here in Serpa and headed straight for the Intermarche.

We've many a time seen these al-fresco laundry facilities in supermarket car parks, but this is the first time we've used them. My observations: 1) handy that you can put a wash on and either go shopping or sit in the comfort of Bertie whilst waiting for it; 2) good quality machines, with a good spin cycle; 3) not enough tumble dryers (they have two washing machines (8kg & 18kg) and one dryer), particularly when so many people bring their wet laundry from home to dry. We ended up having to wait an hour and forty minutes for the dryer, and then only just managed not to lose our place in the queue to two new arrivals. 

It all took long enough that we didn't feel inclined to then go for a look around the town. That'll have to wait until morning. Thus, we just moved next door to the swimming pool car park. Considering there are supermarkets on both sides of us, and the town centre is not far behind us, it was a bit of a surprise to have a flock of bell-toting sheep come through a while later: 

.

(Bit of a random aside: I noted on today's journey that the Portuguese have a love of road signs. The best example is that when encountering a 'no overtaking' stretch of road, not only will the dashed centre line become solid, but there will also be a 'no overtaking' sign on both sides of the road. At the end of the section, not only will the line go back to dashed, but there will also be a 'end of no overtaking' sign on the right side of the road. This can be repeated every few hundred metres on a wibbly bit of road. Add to that a 'warning, bend ahead' sign for even the slightest curve and the multiple changes in speed limit for every junction, and one has to conclude that road-sign making is a good business to be in.)

Sunday 3 March - Lousal

Where's Bertie? He's in a municipal Aire in the village of Lousal. It's free to stay here and the service point is free too. Exact location: 38.03576, -8.42890.

Weather: Sunny and warm right from the start. 

As we drove into Praia do Amado yesterday, on a road that dipped down, climbed back up then dipped down again, I said to Mick that I was glad I'd been for a decent length of run yesterday morning, as it meant I could have a rest day today and not have to tackle that road.

Last night I had a shufty at Wikiloc.com and discovered this route:

That route includes the access road on which we'd driven in...

We could, of course, have walked it, but being entirely on road (only about half of it surfaced, as it turned out) it seemed to lend itself better to a running route (which is exactly what it had been recorded as). So, that's what we did first thing this morning. 

A bit of a hazy start, looking back towards Bertie.

The only little bit of the route that was through civilisation. I was glad of this quick photo stop; that road was not as flat as the snap makes it look!

All along that coastal dirt road were beach access points and parking areas, none of which bore any motorhome parking restrictions (in fact, the car park where Bertie spent last night was the only place we saw that did display a restriction), and I'm sure that we could easily have spent at least another night in the area.

The only reason we didn't stay (and we were teetering on a knife edge of so doing) was because last night I wrote out the remaining days of this trip on a piece of paper and filled in the dates on which we want to be in specific places on our return journey. That left us with only just over a week left in Portugal, and there are other places I'd like to see before we leave.

Thus at 1.30pm, at a time when we would almost certainly under any other circumstances declare 'We may as well stay another night.', we rolled out of the car park.

Unlike the last five weeks, this was not to be a short hop, although I suppose 140km isn't a particularly long way when undertaken in a motor vehicle on good roads. There is not, however, a convenient main road that leads NNE from the southern bit of the west coast up to Lousal, so Bertie endured some incredibly badly surfaced roads with many a bend and not a massive amount of width (although plenty for two large vehicles to pass, as long as everyone sticks to their own side of the road - particularly around the bends), until he finally hit the wide, and mainly well surfaced, IC1 about twenty minutes before our destination.

Lousal got our attention due to reports of interesting ex-mine workings. Between 1900 and 1988 a pyrite mine operated here. In the early 1990s, in the face of mass unemployment and a dying village, a focus was put on cultural tourism, with the old mine offices being turned into shops, a museum and science centre being opened, and mine tours being offered. I'm guessing that the motorhome Aire was also part of the attempts to get people to come here.

We took a first look at the nearest bit of the ex-mine just before the sun went down today. We'll explore more tomorrow.

I'm not sure how successful the change of use has been. The shops now seem to be abandoned and the Aire is full of weeds that suggest that it is not well frequented (there's only us and a German van here tonight). 

It was only after we arrived that I realised the error in our timing. Whilst we knew we wouldn't be able to do the guided tour due to the minimum group size, we came with every intention of visiting the museum and learning about the history of the place. What we'd forgotten is that tomorrow is Monday. In common with much of Europe, municipal visitor attractions don't open on a Monday. Oh well, at least we can walk around the outside bits. 

Saturday 2 March - Praia do Amado

Where's Bertie? He's in a large beach-side car park at Praia do Amado (exact location: 37.16946, -8.90126).

Weather: Some cloud about, but mainly sunny and warm. Bit less windy this afternoon.

We stayed two nights in the car park by the fort at Sagres, spending most of yesterday walking along the coast, in the morning to the E, in the afternoon to the NW. Being mainly limestone and sandstone cliffs, and with a landscape inland that was curiously looked both very arid and very green, it wasn't a shoddy location for a bit of walking:

Under the arrow in that last photo are two fishermen, dangling their legs off a ledge in the cliff.  

It was a touch breezy, mind, and when I looked at the forecast at teatime and found that the wind wasn't going to drop overnight, as it usually does, we decided to forego levelness for a bit of shelter. Over to one side of the car park was a stand of cane, which looked flimsy, but proved to be a surprisingly effective windbreak.

Today we were going to (and did!) move on, but first I decided to forego my non-running day. Having discovered last evening that only just over 6km of road lay between us and the other SW point of Portugal (the one that's more west than south: Cabo de São Vicente), I decided that the obvious thing to do was to start my day by running there and back. The 'there' was the hard part, being net uphill and with a headwind. Coming back was a lot less effort!

Meanwhile, Mick took himself for some laps of the headland on which we were parked (which is exactly where I'd run yesterday, when Mick was resting). 

Breakfast, showers, faffing, shopping, service point visit, more shopping (if we'd realised there was a Lidl on our route, we would have skipped the first shop, which didn't have everything we wanted) and a bit of a drive, took us to early afternoon, which is when we drove into the car park here at Praia do Amado - a place that was recommended to us a couple of weeks back. 

It is a lovely scenic location, but I don't think there's a single spot in either of the large car parks that is level. We've settled for 'nose in the air', which is probably the least problematic slant with which to live (I may vary my opinion on this in the morning, if I roll out of bed in the night!).

View out of Bertie's side window. If that black van wasn't there we would definitely have nabbed that spot!

The sea is the obvious focal point, but behind us is a series of small green hills, criss-crossed with tracks and beside us is a small, quiet road that clings to the coast. After a stroll along the beach this afternoon, it was along that road we walked, to a viewpoint:

  

Thursday 28 February - Sagres

Where's Bertie? He's in a very large car park, by the fort on the headland just outside of the small town of Sagres (exact location: 37.00527, -8.94565).
Weather: Lovely and sunny, but with an increasing wind making this afternoon feel cooler than this morning.

It's been a day of beaches and coastline. I didn't want to leave Lagos without seeing the beach, so after a walk up to the post office this morning we crossed over the pedestrian bridge to the marina (timing it badly, arriving just as it lifted for a yacht to pass through) and headed south.

I'm not a fan of soft sand, and even down at the shoreline we didn't find a firm surface, so it was a flying visit. We walked down to the water, admired the huge expanse of sand, wondered how crowded it gets in summer, took a couple of snaps and walked back.

Looking one way down the beach...

...and the other

Not much time was left on our parking ticket by the time we got back to Bertie, but we only used a fraction of it to stow the last few things and get on the move.

As we're rapidly running towards the end of this trip, we missed out the next couple of places we would have liked to have visited along the coast and made for Sagres instead, parking Bertie in a large car park that sits between the town and the fort: 

Fort straight ahead, Bertie on the left.

It was a disappointment to find that one can't access the headland without paying the fort's entrance fee (a bit like Land's End, I suppose). So, we didn't visit the most south westerly point in Portugal (indeed, in Mainland Europe), but walked a little loop along the cliffs, into town then back on the other side of the headland, which gave us some rather nice views:

For that walk I was wearing socks that had come off the knitting needles only minutes earlier:

After making two pairs of socks from the blue stripey yarn, and a pair of socks, two pairs of fingerless mitts and a pair of gloves from the rainbow stripey yarn, I thought I just had enough left over to combine into a pair of trainer socks. I did indeed and now just those five tiny rolls remain from the original 4x100g balls. In a continuation of the 'using up leftovers' theme, I think I'll cast on a hat next, even though it's not remotely hat weather.