One morning last week I got out of bed and went for a walk on the beach. This, in the town of Porto Covo. It is a quaint, if not beautiful, village on the Atlantic Ocean, an hour's drive south of Lisbon. Like all towns sprinkled around southern Portugal's Atlantic coast, its houses are all whitewashed with either white paint or amazing, muted hues of turquoise, mustard, salmon and so on. I am reminded of a box of crayons that we had as kids. Can you think back to your own crayons and picture these houses? There's no mistaking that I am no longer in Canada (although I remember seeing photos of Newfoundland fishing villages similarly colourful).
If this weren't enough, the streets of the entire town -- and as I later learned, of all Portuguese cities -- are constructed of coarse chunks of black stone, each uniquely shaped, roughly cubic, the size of apples... they look to me like volcanic lava after having cooled down and solidified. Each of the thousands or perhaps millions of individual rocks must be placed one by one on a bed of sand with a space between on all sides. Then, later, sand is spread everywhere to fill in the spaces and voilà, no heavy, expensive equipment needed, just a lot of manual labour, and a road is born. I guess the system works in a country with high unemployment. The progress is slow but no potholes to be seen. On the other hand the sidewalks are made from glossy marble-like, white stones chips which are also placed manually in a random array. They appear to be cemented into place. In both cases, all the streets and sidewalks are uneven, easy to trip on, or stub a toe, even twist an ankle in a crack, with the one upside of them being beautiful, a highway of mosaic object d'art. Speaking of which, in a country with high umemployment, the artistic creativity of the Portuguese is heavily fueled by being unconstrained by gainful employment. As the streets are laid out in random fashion, not Cartesian at all as we are accustomed to in Canada, surely due to the roads having been created long before cars first appeared, many, if not most intersections are at odd angles, resulting in spits of land, too small for a house, but just so for either a beer stand, café, or a sculpture, sometimes life-size, other times humongous. I have come to believe that, either way, it is either an unlicensed commercial activity or an unsanctioned sculpture that simply one day appears. In one case we came upon a series of plush sofas on a wide sidewalk which looked soft and comfortable but were in fact crafted from stone. Comfortable to sit on but far from soft as they appeared to be.
At the risk of repeating myself, I am again surprised by the artistic creativity of the Portuguese. Aside from the interesting graffiti on display everywhere there is a fence or wall, in many cases entire houses have become the canvas for an artist to express him or herself. Almost always brilliant (I only once spied a large wall painted in black and white) with bright colours employed and remarkable definition rendered, I became nearly addicted to photographing the art from an interesting angle or with some contrasting distraction, people walking in front, or a street sign in the foreground providing a clue as to where in the world I was at the time.
As I was saying, I went for a walk on the beach one morning. Five days later I stopped walking and checked the app on my phone: 125 km clocked! Hard to believe isn't it? Harder still was carrying my 30-lb backpack the entire way. While it is true that a small part of the hike was indeed on the beach, the greater part is spent two or three hundred feet above the Atlantic ocean along the cliffs and dunes that parallel the shoreline all the way to Sagres, the town that is at the extreme southwest corner of Portugal, indeed of all of Europe! Each day is spent walking south, and my being overwhelmed by the neverending and spectacular views of the ocean and rocky shoreline ahead seen from high up. I have to tell you that there is very little in life more rewarding than getting out of bed in the morning, having a delicious calorie-dense breakfast and then going for a 25-km walk! Especially when the views are similar to the one you see on this postcard. There is a certain freedom to traveling from town to town without the silly requirement of using a car, or taking a train. A bonus: Ten or twenty secluded, pristine beaches are spotted below each day, one of which we choose to hike down to for a swim and a rest on a daily basis. These beaches are flanked by rocky barriers at either end making our approach down the cliffside somewhat challenging and ultimately the only way to access the sand and surf. Normally, we own the beach as they are all difficult to access, plus there are no roads cut through the brush and cactus to our clifftop hiking trail.
Although the waters along the famous Algarve on Portugal's south coast are quite warm and enjoyable, here the sea is very cold, any swim is short, very short for me at least. Picture me running in before I could change my mind, and 30 seconds later running out before my lips turn blue and my fingers numb! Fortunately the sun then warms me up and dries both me and my hiking shorts soon enough. We walk for five to six hours a day, plus time for breaks, lunch, photos and a swim. And finally stroll into the next seaside town to discover its cafés, architecture and art. Each village has its character, but being beach towns they all share the convention of concentrating its commerce on one or two streets for the tourists to congregate and buy tchotchkas, sip on sangrias and ultimately spend the entire evening on a terrasse for dinner and drinks. The biggest stress of the day is choosing what to eat: grilled sardines, octopus or squid, or maybe a local delicacy of seafood catalana, basically a paëlla without the rice getting in the way. The entire month of June is sardines month in Portugal, don't ask why, and grilling them on a charcoal BBQ is ubiquitous. You may be surprised to learn that a great many of the restaurants do their grilling outside beside or behind the terrasse where we sit, even sometimes on a tiny hibachi.
One of the pleasures of hiking the entire 125-km rota vincentina (the fisherman's walk) is that the seaside villages which dot the route only see Portuguese tourists (with a handful of Canadian exceptions). The foreigners flock to the Algarve where they take over those villages which have by now lost their original character. The Algarve experience really deserves its own postcard so stay tuned. In contrast, I imagine that these smaller villages that hosted us during the late afternoons and evenings along our hike have changed very little over the decades. Small restaurants and cafés adorn the main street and it seems that somebody's mama is cooking up a storm in each of their tiny kitchens. No need for five-star chefs here! Now, dining in a Portuguese restaurant back in Montreal will always bring me back to these enchanted evenings.
Here's hoping all your evenings are enchanted, too!
Barry from Portugal
No comments:
Post a Comment