Portugal: Carrapateira, Monchique and the convent

I figured when we packed up everything and decided to set off together that I'd take some strain with not having a "home".  To be honest when we went on vacation in the past after two weeks I was ready for my own bed so I really wasn't sure how I'd hold up for a longer jaunt.  Now there really isn't a bed somewhere that I can long for and for now that's ok.

To help with "making it home" Anne brought a few things that reminded us of our past homes and I decided that I'd bring our Roku along so we could keep watching some of the shows that we'd been watching in October.

It is a little tiring and annoying to move every couple of weeks and we've learned quite a bit about how to keep rolling with this.  I was adamant that I'd bring everything I needed in two carry on bags (a overhead and under-seat) but Anne will quickly point out that some of my stuff is in the 2 large suitcases that we check in on the flights and drag along between locations.

My work setup is a laptop on a light fold-up stand (it folds to the size of a small pencil case) with a second small flat monitor and a small keyboard and mouse.  It is pretty important that this setup is something that I can comfortably use for work because I'm at it for 8 - 10 hours a day and occasionally more.  Some of these hours are really late at night depending on where we are staying.  I was also adamant that I would work my regular hours.

I have been stopped a few times because of all the electronics that I had with me.  We have a small battery powered CO2 detector and I brought a small wireless router for the roku and to connect seamlessly back to the USA.  After the second time having to unpack everything to show the little electronic bits I have been putting them into a bag in one of the big suitcases along with some toiletries and my portable hair and beard trimmer.

Not that the hair trimmer has seen much use.  I have ignored cutting my hair since more or less the middle of COVID and it is now quite comfortable down to my shoulders.

When we arrive at a new AirBnb I unpack the small packing cubes I use to organize my clothing and then set up my workstation, the little wireless router and the roku.  Our iphones, computers and Anne's tablet don't have to be reconfigured every time because we still use the wireless hotspot that I had at our home in Essex.

In the Europe and UK timezones I get up at 7:30am (2:30am EDT), read the news and do our duolingo lesson and the wordle (a friendly competition each morning with Anne to see who does it in the least steps) and then we are free to explore until 1pm (8an EDT) when I get myself set up - take care of any admin on the computer and get my head ready for work.  5pm local coincides with lunchtime in the US.

I have left my computer's date and time on EDT because it was getting too confusing to do the timezone conversion everytime a meeting was announced or planned.  The net effect is that once I get zoned into work I often look up at 4pm EDT surprised to see it is dark outside.  Its 9pm local time!  Work ends at 10pm and I'm in bed by 11:30pm.

Our stop in Carrapateira in the Aljezur region has been almost two weeks and is our penultimate stop.  We'll be in Lisbon for two weeks before returning to the US for the rest of May.

Carrapateira is tiny with a single small shop and a few restaurants but with two surf shops.  The town is also on the Rota Vicentina (Fisherman's trail) and you often see hikers on the beach coming off the trail hot and exhausted or in the restaurants.

Hiker snacking after a swim

Our favorite restaurant was Alecrim - we ended up going there for lunch enough times to work through their main meal menu once and a bit.  The chef is Nepalese and the dahl that he makes is really tasty, but so is everything else.

Bacalhau à Brás is a meal with potatoes, egg and cod and I took a photo of it to send to our friend in Sanatarem who I think served this to us when we visited her and her husband.  It is delicious.

There is plenty of hiking around this town and we took a walk up on to the cliffs to the south of the local beach. 

There are landmark metal sculptures of letters with carved inscriptions on their backs describing something significant about the area around and we walked from the letter C to the letter E on one of our mornings.

Monchique is the highest mountain in Portugal and the town Monchique is just below the top of the mountain.  The road to the town from where we were staying was pretty narrow and winding with some gaping drops on the one side along parts of the routes.  I found myself wondering how some of the houses built near these cliffs are going to hold up against the erosion that will inevitably weaken their foundations. 

When we got close to the town we came across this very impressive granite quarry - it is incredible to see how the granite has been hewn out of the mountain leaving stunningly vertical cliffs in the cavity that has been created by cutting and extraction of the granite blocks.

The town is quaint, although it has a reputation of getting very hot in the summer, but our visit there was really comfortable with a cool breeze blowing.

The views from the mirador are really beautiful and the town has the characteristic narrow streets lined with terraced houses.

We visited two interesting places, the first an eccentric ceramicist who makes unusual figures of humans, animals and insects many of which are installed in the water feature at the centre of the town.  The gallery is high on the side of the mountain and is quite enchanting.

We spent some time walking in the garden and examining the caricatured creatures before going back down to the center

where I ordered a town specialty Asadura de Porco Preta (black pork roast) which a plateful of cut up roasted pork strips with fries and a salad.  Pigs are farmed here so I guess this is why it is a town specialty.

After lunch we hiked up the side of the mountain to an old convent.  We had read that people are squatting there and assumed that we would not be able to go in.

Indeed there were markings on the doors and walls all around the deteriorating building that said "Familia" and "Private".  

I'm not sure what prompted me to ask a man sitting on a rock near the front entrance whether the convent was closed (I used the Spanish word "cerrada" with some hand signs) - and he promptly got up and beckoned for us to follow him.  I said "no tengo dinero" (I don't have money) again relying on Spanish and he shook his head and said "no problema".

Of course we were immediately on high alert because he was leading us along a long and winding path around the back of the convent but for some reason I felt ok to follow him - deciding that if things started to get dodgy we'd have to make a plan

He pulled a gate open and then a double door leading in to the convent which was a cavernous hall with no roof and a couple of trees growing in it and then he locked the door behind us!

I was wondering if there were a gang of people who would fleece us once we were inside, but it was deserted.  Afterwards Anne told me she was imagining how she would defend us with her hiking poles.

He gestured to different rooms for me to see and made hand signs to take photos before telling us that the convent had been there since the 1400s.

We discovered afterwards in a write-up that the property is owned by a person local to the town and that he is quite happy for people to go in there and get a tour at no charge.  We still don't know who the person is who let us in but he was kind and friendly and I wish I had had some spare change for him.

We took a leisurely drive back on the other main road to Monchique - to Portimao - a busy town just north of Lagos but turned off on the highway to bring us back to our AirBnb.

I'm constantly evaluating these towns and the properties against the "could I live here" metric.  Anne would say my bar is too low because I have often told her that I could live in a box but I do find it interesting to see what is on offer in the realtors' windows.

Real estate office behind Anne at the restaurant

For the first time since getting here the realtors' window didn't feature large beautiful homes of over $1 million but rather featured many dilapidated houses, some on large farms for under $100 000.  One that struck my eye was a farm of over 1000m2 with three homes on it for $450 000.  A little pricey and of course got me wondering if these houses had permits to be fixed up.  From the look of it one of the 3 houses was in reasonably good shape but the other two were a mess.

We'll be back in the area in a few months with a more critical eye, looking more seriously for a place that we can long to return to after a 2 week vacation somewhere.

Portugal: Tango Juliet and Adonis

The default main road intersections in Portugal are rotaries and it took us a little time to figure out the polite way to use them while driving.

 Like in America, the person entering the rotary has to give way to anyone already in the rotary.  Drivers tend to use their indicators to signal their intent as they enter the rotary - a left indicator means that you don't intend to take the next exit and a right indicator means you're about to exit.  What's more, if there are two lanes in the rotary, the outer lane is reserved for cars that have just entered and will immediately exit the rotary.

Of course plenty of people don't know all of these rules so you might find yourself in the inner lane indicating that you will exit at the next exit only to be blocked by someone in the outer lane who fully intends to keep going around the rotary for an undefined number of exits.  Usually these people are tourists from countries who don't have many rotaries or countries where rules of the road are treated as rough guidelines rather than rules.

Anne and I found navigating through the rotaries a little tricky when we started driving around in the Algarve with the GPS.  I was concentrating on the road and had a heads up display on the dashboard that warned me of rotaries coming up but gave an imprecise view of which exit I had to take.  Soon Anne was telling me "go straight through" or "turn right" but when you have rotaries with 5 exits you have to be a little more precise so I suggested that Anne use the military co-ordinates on a watch-face to explain which exit to take once in the rotary.  I "mansplained" that your 6 is behind you ("watch my 6") and 12 o'clock is go straight through etc.  

It didn't take long before Anne starting calling me Tango Juliet and saying things like "take your 11, tango juliet" as we approached the next rotary.  It didn't help that I kept getting confused and having to go all the way around once more because I thought my 9 was my 3.

My cousin, Trevor and his wife and her sister-in-law (who is also looking at Portugal as a destination), met us for lunch at a cliff-side restaurant called Sitio do Forno not far from our Aljezur house-sit,

Everywhere you go here on the south west coast there are high, steep cliffs, many of which have these hidden beaches that are reachable via paths, stairways or roads with only a little parking available.  It reminds me each time what a nightmare it must be in the summer if you don't live within walking distance of the beaches.

After Aljezur we had to take a trip back to Faro to return our rental car.  We had decided to rent another car because the areas that we still want to see are more remote than a bus or Uber would take us.  I'm not even sure whether Uber works down in the Algarve like it did in Porto where it was a fairly cheap option for getting around.

We stayed in a little AirBnb for three nights in a less affluent part of a town called Quarteira which allowed us to go for morning walks on the beach and was close to the car rental place. 

An interesting feature of many homes in Portugal are these blinds - they are usually outside the window and get lowered down.  If you lower them completely they allow no light into the room and cut down on noise from outside.  In this AirBnb we lifted the blinds a little to allow some air in at night but the morning light coming through the gaps made for a good way to wake up.

Our brief stop in Faro also allowed us to visit two people who had unexpectedly reached out to us.  Both of them live in Quinta do Lago on the outskirts of the town of Almancil just north of Faro. 

The first was an ex-Rhodes university friend, Erik, who is living with his lovely family in a large resort.  It was very cool to catch up with him and to meet his wife and children.  They have had a pretty adventurous life - having met in England and then traveled extensively for a couple of years before settling down to live in Portugal.

The second, our son-in-law's aunt, has lived in France and now Portugal and has an incredible home in Almancil.  She is a painter and wildlife photographer and had some interesting stories to tell about her experiences.  

We took a drive to a nearby beach after spending the morning with her.  The beaches in the Algrave are so  long and almost empty at this time of year.

Most interesting for me has been to hear stories about the transition from wanting to move, to deciding where, and then making it happen.  There are so many hidden details to all of this and it reminds me somewhat of when we decided to leave South Africa in the early "aughts" (Americans call the 2000-2009 the "aughts" and the Brits call it the "noughties").  One of the things immediately apparent to me then was that the more resources you have, the more likely you would act on any second thoughts and bail on your move when things get tough.  Having fewer resources more or less commits you to your destination regardless of whether the choice was really the best one and ironically makes the move and transition easier because you have no choice but to work through all the problems in your new place.

So now, thinking of retiring somewhere closer to where our grandchildren are and within easy reach of our sons, puts Europe and England in contention, but where?  Having spent two years learning Spanish made it the obvious first choice but we have been persuaded to check out other places.  So here we are.

It's still too early to say what we think, to be honest.  We spent a little time in Spain last year and now a little more time in Portugal.  England is next and then, probably, a longer rental in one of these three areas for a few months to get more serious about where to go and what it will take to make the move.

Aljezur has really appealed to us - wild and fairly remote but only 30mins drive from Lagos by car (so within reach of facilities that we might need).  

After our house-sit in Aljezur we settled on a small town called Carrapateira in the southern most part of the Aljezur region, not far north of Sagres.  Our AirBnb is not more than a 5min walk from the beach.

Anne and I drove up north one morning of this week to visit a town called Odeceixe (pronounced "udd-sesh").   I know!  The relationship between how letters look and sound in Portuguese is confusing for us too.  We have learned that any word ending with an "s" is said with an "sh" and many vowels are dropped or combined to make a single syllable.  Learning Portuguese would be a really big task.

The beach in Odeceixe is described as one of the most beautiful beaches in Portugal.  The town is on a steep hillside and the beach is very broad and long, but is snuggled in a cove of high cliffs.

We saw a sign that announced that to the left of this beach is a naturist beach and after walking its length we came back to see that the tide was low enough for us to walk around to the almost deserted clothing-optional beach.  A single person way on the other side of the beach appeared to be enjoying the freedom it offered.

Anne and I took a quick dip au naturel before making our way back up for lunch at a restaurant overlooking the main beach.

The AirBnb we have for these two weeks is a short walk from a really wide beach.  The breeze is cool but the waves are impressive and Anne couldn't resist buying a body board. 

We can spend the morning walking on the beach until my start of the business day in the afternoon so this is a pretty good way to balance these two things.

On Sunday we saw two kite surfers moving across the water at high speed with their boards. 

A very strenuous activity in the stiff sea breeze.

Portugal: Aljezur (or thereabouts)

Aljezur means "of islands" in Arabic and has been inhabited since pre-history (some evidence from 7000 BC) with nomadic tribes.  Settlements started in around 3000BC but the largest expansion of buildings started in the 10th Century with the Muslim occupation of Spain and Portugal.  The Moors ruled for around 500 years from the 10th Century until the region was taken from them by the Christians in 1249. The coastal towns in near Aljezur were plagued by pirates who attacked and kidnapped people to be sold as slaves in Algiers until as late as the 17th Century.

The landscape here is quite different from what we had seen as we traveled along the coast from Tavira and Lagos.  To the east of Aljezur, not far from the coast, is the Serra de Monchique which is a chain of mountains just under 1000m (3200ft) high and so the drive from Lagos to Aljezur included a fairly winding road which again reminded us of the landscape of the Eastern Cape in South Africa and the drive from the coast to Makhanda (which was known as Grahamstown when we lived there in the 1980s and 1990s).

The entire area is protected and we saw many more trees along the route.  We had decided to not take the main road from Lagos but rather to drive again to Sagres and then take the smaller road between Sagres and Aljezur.  The driving was a little hairy with the narrow and twisty road with a speed limit of 90km/h (55mph), which felt a little fast for the road.

Our week in Aljezur is another house-sit.  The home is actually a little west of Aljezur (which is built in a valley) up on the hills in a settlement called Vale da Telha that was founded in 1977.   The area has suffered from problems caused by the fact that it is built in a nature reserve and with little infrastructure for services.  As a result the area was described as "chaotic and without infrastructure" by the mayor of Aljezur in 2021.  A development plan is underway to set in motion the creation of services for the area.

From google maps it looks like a very modern street plan with a grid, lots of cul-de-sacs and rotaries and so I imagined that we'd see very modern houses filling the area.  

To the contrary the area is underdeveloped with a number of large and expensive houses interspersed with empty plots, abandoned construction and small single-story houses and the streets are in fairly rough shape.  Not terrible, just obviously not in the rotation for regular repaving when they need it.

Our hosts told us that the street lights were a new addition (they have been living here for some time) and that although there are buses that run regularly they have only recently installed bus stops.

A number of British and European immigrants have moved to this area and there has been pressure to get the services upgraded on the strength of their tax contribution to the region and it appears that the town of Aljezur has been working on this for some years.

The entire settlement and surrounds appears to be built on sea sand.  Walking paths are all loose sea sand with thriving vegetation (bushes and grasses) on either side.

House-sitting requires some adjustments to our routine.  This one had two sweet older dogs that we were warned could wander off on our walks and a black and white cat who is pretty domesticated and two other cats who came to the house when the owners moved in but have since become more "outside" cats, returning occasionally for food.  We saw one of them once and another that came by regularly for food but came into the house with a great deal of trepidation.

We were told that the dogs would ask to sit on the couch with us and might try to get on the bed but we should not allow it.

So we settled down for our first night on the eve of Easter Sunday with the two dogs asleep on their beds, one on each side of our bed.

Anne (I might have mentioned) startles easily and once we were fast asleep the cat decided to jump onto her without warning.   She woke with a loud shriek that terrified the cat and the dog next to her instinctively went into attack mode.  The cat was gone from the room before it lost its life and Anne and I were left in a flight or fight stance with adrenaline raging through our bodies.  "What the hell just happened!?"

Anne settled back down and we started to laugh uncontrollably.  In a pause, I asked: "Did you remember to hide easter eggs for me?"  Which had us in fits of laughter again.

We didn't see the cat again that night and figured out a routine after that to make our nights less alarming without disrupting the dogs' and cat's routines too much.

House-sitting also has the advantage of getting you out to walk the dogs.  We explored some of the nature reserve that surrounds the settlement - including a 45min walk on a path that is regularly used for horse riding and then a longer walk to this magnificent beach that apparently is pretty hard to get to without a long hike. 

We thought that we saw a way to get down to it from the top of the cliff but we were already pretty exhausted from walking on the path from where we had parked.  So we have left that for another day.

The cliff looks deceptively easy in this panorama - it is too steep to go down

The town of Aljezur is packed with rows of apartment blocks well-suited to the summer holiday maker.  We visited the castle in the old town center  from which we had views of the landscape around and of the newer part of the town.

The streets and houses in the older center of town are as charming as in the other towns we've visited in the Algarve. 

Quite a few of the houses are in good shape.  

 

We wondered about driving up and down these narrow streets, some of which had tight turns and barely fit two cars abreast.

Some of them, built under the castle, have stunning views of the valley.  In this case overlooking the new town with the big supermarket in front of the rows of apartments.

There are two streams that converge at the town and it boasts a series of trails that you can walk.

The town is also on the path of the Rota Vicentina which is a 750km (466mi) long trail along the west coast of Portugal.  The trail also passes in the vicinity of our house-sit and was a feature of our twice-daily dog walking while we stayed there.

We visited an overlook near our house-sit that was once a Muslim fortification called the "Ribat of Arrifana".  It was built in 1130 under the direction of one of the prominent leaders in the Iberian Muslim occupied territory.  He was later assassinated after being accused of betraying Islam by followers of the Almohad movement, a powerful Berber dynasty that eventually ruled southern Iberia and the Algarve.  The ribat fell into disrepair after his death.   

In 2001 archeologists began to excavate the ruins.  There are fences around two of the areas that still show evidence of walls.

The views from this site are as impressive as any of the cliffs in the western part of the Algrave

including a massive rock that appears to have broken off from the cliff - and shows long straight lines of sediment that are now vertically oriented.

Not far from us is a beach on a fairly narrow road called Monte Clerigo with a couple of restaurants.  We took some time one morning to get coffee and cake and walk the beach.  

On one side are interesting rock formations with rock pools.  They look like they were the center of a meteor strike because they have radiating circular patterns with a bull's eye in the middle.

We are now six months into our travels.  We sold our house and boarded an airplane a few days later.

We'll be staying in Western Portugal for another few weeks and then onto more things.

I'm feeling more inclined to stay somewhere for few months because moving every two weeks is starting to wear a little thin.  I think we are getting closer to a series of more realistic experiments in experiencing living where we might eventually end up.

Portal: Lagos - the devil is in the details

Lagos (pronounced "Largoosh") is in the South West of Portugal.  The entire coast from east to west is under 2 hours of driving and so it was a short drive of about and hour to get from Tavira to my cousin, Trevor's house, which overlooks a golf course with a large green expanse of lawns.

Trevor kindly hosted us for the weekend and took us sightseeing almost every day in the region around Lagos, starting with an hour-long walk on a loop to the cliffs overlooking beaches near their house and then for drives to beaches along the coast from Lagos to Sagres. 

The sign in Sagres (South East tip of Portugal) "the last Bratwurst before America"

We had almost daily walks to different places of interest in and near the city in the week that followed.

 The coastline is incredibly beautiful.  It is reminiscent of the Great Ocean Road that I visited when I went on a work trip to Australia in 2018.  

There are eroding rock sentinels in the sea and cliffs of tan-colored sandstone that appear to be crumbling.

and further along the coast some very vertical cliffs that are apparently a much harder rock.

and a little further along some banded sandstone cliffs

On one cliff is an old fortified stronghold - perhaps from when the Moors ruled Portugal and Spain - that looks as though it is going to end up in the sea at some point.

As you can imagine with all of this beautiful scenery the question on our minds was "How did you get to live in such a beautiful place?" and the answer was quite complicated.

Trevor and Charlotte, his wife, moved here some years ago after spending much of their working life in North Africa where his family had many good years but a few really harrowing experiences.  His journey to the Algarve took a few years, starting with buying his house for vacations and then eventually settling here.

Over the few days of going on walks to and along the shoreline and hanging out with him, we got some new perspectives on what it takes to buy and own a home and then move to Portugal.

Trevor and Anne with an abandoned house on the horizon

In Portugal, any modification outside of the home (including additions) requires permits from the authorities.  If these permits are not registered in the equivalent of a deeds office, the additions are illegal.  Most knowledgeable buyers use a trusted lawyer to verify that all of the existing buildings were built with a permit.  Many sellers and realtors get fuzzy on the details of permits and try to pressure buyers to seal the deal before someone else does and then, without permits, insurance companies will refuse to cover the buildings.

Land-use laws in Portugal are complicated.  Buildings and land can be classified in ways that prevent any repairs to old buildings, or the construction of any new buildings, so buying a piece of land might result in you owning something that you can't build on.

We heard about someone who bought a smallholding of several acres only to find that the section of the smallholding that came to them was a tiny area of land on which the main house was built.   The orchard and barns remained in the hands of the seller.  Someone else bought a house to discover that most of the things that were attractive to them in the sale were added without permits and learned that they would have to demolish these "add-ons" or hoodwink the new buyer if they were ever to try to sell it again.

Many homes for sale in the Algarve priced at around $100k to $200k are basically unlivable and possibly irreparable (depending on how the houses have been zoned).  The realtor photographs will show furnished rooms but not the big hole in the ceiling or the sagging, collapsed roof.

If you ignore the irreconcilable permit situation, assuming that you will never sell again, you doom your descendants to a legal quagmire that might result in them abandoning the property in turn.

Another glaring hiccup for us (should we be inclined to try to move to Portugal) is that the visa process to get residence includes getting a recent "vault" copy of our full birth certificates.  This is a process that we went through in South Africa for the Green Card in the USA.  Only here, the vault copy has to be embossed by a government official within 3 months of the application being made for the visa.

Anyone who has experienced South African bureaucracy at work will know that this means probably 18 months.

So the bottom line is that you have to get a lawyer (preferably referred by someone you trust or from a large law firm) and a realtor, and be ready to put an offer in for a house only once the permit and land-use paperwork has been checked for potential obstacles, and someone has properly inspected the house for any glaring problems.  Then buy the house and then have someone ready in South Africa who can expedite your applications for documentation for the permanent residence visa.  No doubt there will be more to learn if we actually go down this path.

It feels like buying a home in America all over again - assume the seller is scamming you and do your best to discover how before you sign any papers.

On Wednesday Trevor took us on a walk to the Lagos marina and into the old part of the city.  You can tell that this place must be very busy in the summer.  Already this early on in the year there are rows of stalls selling tickets for boat rides and kayak adventures into the caves below the cliffs we'd seen earlier on our walks.

We had wondered about art in the city because there wasn't the same proliferation of sculptures and art on the walls of buildings and in plazas as we had seen in Mexico, but I suppose we hadn't been looking in the right places.  

The center has some beautifully tiled buildings

and streets with patterned stone paving

and more wall art

It was great to reconnect and share stories of many years ago...  Who would have thought that together we'd have forgotten so many things.

Luckily our shared memories were pretty complementary and we were able to piece together details between the two of us.  Trevor has an extensive family tree with details about our shared grandfather that I had never known about before!  He came from Blackpool - we all thought as a lone adventurer - but it turns out his father and a few of his brothers were also in South Africa when he was young.

A fellow traveler from way back.