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.