Two years in Portugal

We celebrated the beginning of our third year in Portugal on the 27th of February and spent the first few months of the year enjoying the improvements that we had made to heating water for the house, including the underfloor heating.

It didn't take long to figure out once the electrical bill started climbing, what we had saved with the wood-burning kitchen stove vs what winter would cost in the future with the new electrical systems (stove and heat pump).  The firewood increased to €185 per tonne (approximately half a cord) last year so the 6 tonnes (3 cords) would have cost €955 this year.  As the electrical bills came in it became apparent that we were not going to be saving much even with the efficient heat pump (€1500 between October and April) so we will have to accelerate getting the solar panels installed.

Since I last posted we took a trip to England

London, for Thanksgiving?  American traditions

in November to celebrate Thanksgiving with three of our children (Matt was planning to join us for Christmas in Portugal).   

Thanksgiving is our favorite holiday

 

Back in Portugal, we are part of an informal hiking group, and enjoyed a few hikes in October and November before the weather got consistently rainy.  There are plenty of really nice walks within a short distance of us, some along the coastline and others further inland. 

Lagging behind to record the hike

Our group takes turns to lead walks and we've led two so far since we joined.

In December we had a visit from Nick and his girlfriend Vanessa.  We spent a couple of days in Lisbon where we walked to a few Christmas Markets and visited a design museum.

Christmas Market at Parque Eduardo VII

  We picked Matt up at Lisbon's airport and traveled further north to Nazaré 

Nazaré lighthouse and waves

where we got to see surfers being pulled into the gigantic waves.  

Just after releasing the tow rope

Back in the Algarve we were invited to celebrate a wonderful Christmas day with our Scandinavian neighbors who sang entertaining songs each time a toast was made. 

A Scandinavian Christmas in the Algarve

As the rains came we hunkered down, spending time on personal projects at home, interspersed with hikes and alternate jam sessions with two guitarists I have been playing with.

Playing with Marcus

 Emma and Jess also came to spend a few days with us in March and the sunny weather showed up for them.

At the Alte waterfall

Our Portuguese classes continue.  We have finished the course work for A2 - which is shorthand for basic verbal and written literacy but unfortunately is not enough to really have a good conversation with a native speaker, unless they are very patient and speak slowly.  But we are determined to keep working at it and spend almost every morning with some activity like crosswords, conjugation exercises or a little reading.

We have planned two trips for this year.  The first to Albuquerque, New Mexico to meet Matt and his partner and the second to Namibia to travel inland into the game reserves, going up to Etosha Pan and the Okavango swamps.

 Since we have already left for the USA I'll have an update on the trip there fairly soon.

 

Legionella, tech stuff and stepping out

It is deep into our second winter in Portugal.  We saw the tail end of last year's winter but got to experience a cold house with no hot water when we moved in so I felt we needed to be well prepared this time around.

I described our engine room and the solar heating for our water - at the time I mistakenly referred to the water heating array as photovoltaic when in fact it is an evacuated tube solar collector. 

The difference being that these vacuum tubes heat fluid that is passed over a small, hyper-heated metal tip at the top of each rather than by producing electricity that can be used to power a hot water element.

My concern as I tried to get familiar with the three pumps and how the water in our large water tank is heated was eased over the summer when the solar array had no trouble keeping our hot water at around 45ºC (113F) which was more than adequate for showers.

As we moved into fall I had a few different contractors come over to look at the water heating system to see how it could be improved.  I has bothered me that we have to light a fire in the kitchen stove to heat the water especially in the spring and fall when we are not getting enough heat from the solar tubes to keep the showers hot though it is not cool enough to need a fire burning in the kitchen.  

Anne and I have been so jaded from all of our previous months of travel that we have been reluctant to move around much and it took a forced trip to Lisbon to get South African passports renewed for Nick and me.  It got us to think about moving around a little more.  I had booked tickets soon after we arrived to see Jacob Collier in November in Lisbon and had an appointment to handle some administrative tasks for my residency permit in December. 

Jacob Collier concert

This forced us to travel to Lisbon a few times, with the added need to spend at least one night in Lisbon each time.  So we started to look into low-key places to visit while we there.

It turns out that going to Lisbon distance-wise is much like driving up to the White Mountains from our home in Boston (2hrs) or driving to Port Elizabeth from Grahamstown (ok, maybe a bit further than that) - two typical journeys that we were willing to make reasonably often when we lived there. 

Banksy museum

Because Portugal is so small these trips feel huge but we put on our American attitude about distances where we'd have no problem going from Boston to New York for a weekend (5-6 hours drive) so why hesitate to go to Lisbon?

We loved some of the parks and museums in Lisbon and now feel less intimidated about walking in the city or visiting to watch some culture when it  comes up.

And why not visit Seville for that matter?  One of Anne's best friends from our days in Grahamstown was visiting her sister in Madrid and we drove to Seville to meet her and spend time catching up the day after New Year's day.  

 Cindy is a fellow artist and has a son a little younger than the boys are.  It was great to visit the grand cathedral in Seville with her and to go out for a meal on the river before she had to return on the high-speed train to make her flight back home.

Returning from Seville put the heating situation back into focus.  Because the system we have is complicated, I could see the visiting plumber/heating person's brain shutting down when they saw it all and I would wait for the inevitable: "I don't really understand this system so I think you should install (a) a new electric boiler, (b) a heat pump or (c) photovoltaic cells to heat water on the roof".  

I guess I understand how this works - people don't want to take on something that is complicated and may end up costing them a lot of time, but it bothers me that the prices for these alternative systems are high and I'd rather find out how we can mitigate the specific problem in the short term and then hear a plan for how to improve it over time instead of just fork-lifting it all out and replacing it.

The hot water tank is enclosed in a room made out of insulated iron cladding and the tank itself has a large insulated cover on it.  The person who did our pre-inspection for the sale of the house said that the hot water tank can be fitted with an electrical element so I'm planning to open the room up and see if I can find where this fitting is and then get a plumber to just install the element and a thermostat.  If that works we can start to talk to him about upgrades along the lines that he prefers.  Anne is not enjoying how the air in the house deteriorates when we add wood to the fire so we will probably aim to switch that stove out in favor of something that will be less problematic with her asthma.

I mentioned in my previous post that Rob and Eurika visited from Melbourne. He described his sophisticated heating system and septic handling.  He does have a heat pump and is able to set things up so that he uses batteries during prime time and then get the solar array to work charging the batteries and providing electricity for the rest of the time.  Their septic system is amazing too,  designed to produce water for irrigation with all of their grey water and the outcome of processing the sewage being cycled back into watering the plants.  

I read about this and don't see that the septic arrangement is possible for us because you need a pretty large area for a septic system like this.  The solar electricity is feasible.  Portugal is almost 80% on renewable energy so our electricity is not very expensive but it would be nice to lower the need for electricity from the grid where we can.

I have become a little less tolerant of running the tank at 45ºC after the conversation about legionella with Rob so I’ve been working to keep the tank water on or above 55C which has meant more frequently having to light the fire even if it is warm out.

So now, in the dead of winter I have been stuck with a daily routing: come down in the morning to check that the fire still has glowing embers, get it burning again and then go outside to check the various temperatures (top of tank, stove generated heat, solar tube temperature) - I usually check the temperatures a few times during the day.  The under-floor heating and showers drain the heat from the tank, so we have leave the under the floor pump off if the tank temperature isn't higher than 55ºC.  

It's a pain having to make this trip outside a few times a day (and then again at night just before we go upstairs to get ready for bed).   If it is raining for a few days in succession as it has been for the last couple of weeks it becomes even more of a pain.

I remembered that a friend who managed a training/recreational retreat on an island with a lighthouse in Maine had given me a link to his notes on how he set up monitors for equipment and temperatures and controlled some of the electronics.  I dug it up in an email from a few years ago for some of the details - in particular the type of temperature sensor and how to store the data coming from them in a way that can be used to graph it.

This would be ideal, because being able to see what the temperature trends are over the course of a few days could help me decide when to turn on the pump for the underfloor heat and also to see how much heat is actually coming from the solar tubes (I had more or less decided that they are not doing much at all).

I paid about €18 for a small IoT (internet of things) device from Shelly to which you can attach an ad-on that will allow up to 5 temperature sensors (costing about €18 as well). 

The small red and black Shelly with add on

A bonus was that the Shelly device is intended for measuring electrical usage and has an electronic switch in it.  That tiny box has 2 wifi radios and is about the size of a regular matchbox so it is easy to install in an electrical encasing.  The 2 wifi radios allow you to use one of them for initial configuration and the other to connect to the home wifi so that it can push data to whatever you have set up to receive it.

It was a bit strange dusting off some of the  software tools that I used at work.  We used software that a colleague installed to graph test-bed performance. I installed it here to measure internet speeds and my internet router performance and so I was able to pull together the bits that I need to start graphing the water heating system as well.

I discovered that the heat from the solar tubes is not insignificant.  It looks like I should get a larger array.  It circulates fluid into the hot water tank close to the bottom of the tank where the temperatures are a bit lower and you can see in the screenshot of the graph below the yellow lines show how it has varied over the past week of mostly raining days and then again was doing better yesterday and today when the sun came out for a few hours.

The blue graph shows when the underfloor heating is on and the green graph is the temperature of the fluid returning to the tank from the floor.  It goes up to just under 30ºC - I usually turn it on in the morning and sometimes leave it on all day depending on how comfortable we are at home.

The Shelly control panel with the electronic switch

By Boston standards it is mild here but with the outside temperatures between 2ºC and 14ºC we find that our home is toasty with the woodstove going and the underfloor heating on.  Without the underfloor heating we have to use traditional heating from fans blowing over heated elements and so it is a much more comfortable heat if it comes from a warm floor.  

Not to mention that Anne loves to not wear shoes whenever possible.

Anne posing at our new gate with her Scatterlings of Africa design

Portugal: somewhere near Lisbon

Our last stop in Portugal was Lisbon but the AirBnb we booked was a small house in a town called Sesimbra about 40min drive south of the capital city - ironically about the same distance that we lived from Boston.

The drive up from Carrapateira allowed us to see a few small towns along the West coast.  Some of these towns are a little more isolated from the point of view of road travel - being midpoint between Lisbon and the south coast, but a couple of them are large enough to be full blown cities in their own right.

Our first stop was near Odemira which looks like a small, peaceful town, if a little too remote from any major centers.  The view of the beach close to the town was spectacular as usual.

We next stopped at Vila Nova de Milfontes and found the beaches to be quite lovely - also with the cliffs characteristic to the west coast and on one of the beaches there appears to have been a lot of activity stacking stones.

 

 An interesting statue stands at the top of the town's main beaches.

The town is the location of one of the first Portuguese flights to the Far East in 1924 - two years after the first Portuguese flight to the Americas in 1922.  There is a monument to this feat in a square in the town.  The wings of the aircraft are decorated with the Portuguese Cross.

The small development in Sesimbra is characteristically populated with a mix of finished new houses - the architecture, a simple block-on-block design which I guess has to grow on you and some older houses and plenty of open lots and unfinished buildings bearing witness to the fallout of the economic woes of the early 2000's.

The walk to the beach here was around 30min and the most popular area is a large lagoon, at the moment closed off from the ocean by soft sand that has built up in the absence of storms that would ordinarily keep the mouth open.  

The area is very popular for kite surfing and we saw plenty of it.  The beach itself has wild waves and a strong backwash and the sea water is Atlantic cold so not terribly appealing - even though the water is a touch warmer than Boston (similar to Camp's Bay water temperatures in Cape Town).

Emma and Jess visited us for a 4 day weekend at the end of our stay in Sesimbra.  

We had discovered some dirt paths on the ocean side of our settlement that led to more isolated beaches and realized after two encounters with naked people walking along the beach that we really should have done more research before venturing out in that direction.  

In our defense when we visited the beaches around here we were surprised to see that there were fewer women sunbathing topless and I assumed up here near Lisbon is was less common - so too was a second more isolated beach which had an area close to a parking lot

Where we miscalculated was that stretches of this beaches are a world famous naturist area called Praia do Meco - infamous back in the day because it was the first naturalist beach in Portugal.  The nudist beach is to the left of the public and family friendly area below the stairs and near the two restaurants (which were still closed for the season).

So it was that we were surprised on two occasions to see someone walking towards us who turned out to be naked.  They had obviously not read the description of where the nude beach was either.

To be honest there is a much more relaxed view here.  Some people are comfortable changing in public without the struggle with towels around them and others are fine being among people in various states of undress on the beaches.  One beach in Lagos had a group of naturalists gathered on the far edge and families in swimsuits in the areas closer to the parking lots.

Before Emma and Jess arrived, Anne and I made an attempt to go to Lisbon for a morning in the car to see Sintra which is a beautiful area that attracted the rich residents to build homes in the hills to escape the heat in summer.  

There is a palace up there that we thought would be good to see - but the morning traffic and the crowds visiting the palace made it impossible to do more than drive past it and then turn around to come back for the start of my work day.  We'll have to make that trip again when we have more time and we've figured out public transport a little better.

We took a trip to Lisbon on the Saturday, this time parking at the ferry on the South Bank of the river Tagus - the great river that we had seen in Santerém that starts somewhere in Spain.  We walked around a bit before deciding to just give in to the hop-on-hop off bus tour which took us past some of the sights in the city including Jeronimo's Monastery,

the 25th April Bridge (named after the 1974 Carnation revolution)

and the monument to the ocean explorers (we learned about two of them in history over and over each year at school: Vasco Da Gama and Bartholomew Diaz - although our school-learned pronunciation of their names would make them unrecognizable in Portugal).

It was lovely to have Emma and Jess visit us for these four days despite the exposure to over-exposed individuals which gave us a few laughs in the days after.

 

On Sunday we took a trip to the city of Evora, which has the oldest university in Portugal.  It was an hour-long trip and a much larger city than I expected.  We drove up some really narrow streets and parked near a beautiful cathedral which is close to the ruins of a Roman temple to Diana.

The cathedral offers views of the city and is magnificently decorated.  It was built between 1186 and 1204 but went through series of additions and enlargements over about an 80 year period when gothic-style additions were made. 

The cardinal of this cathedral was the brother of King John III (The Pious) from 1512-1580 who ended up being the king of Portugal for two years after the ruling king was killed in a battle in Morocco.

At lunch we had a very entertaining waiter who was playing games with French, English and Portuguese while he was taking our order.  We were trying to order in Portuguese but our rate of success hasn't been great.

We then went to a Franciscan cathedral - also very lavishly decorated and then on to the Chapel of the Bones which is just what you'd imagine from the name.

We read a few articles about this chapel.  Some articles gloss over the origin of the bones to emphasize the message in the building, while others describe them as the bones of 5000 Muslims who had been murdered.

An article explains that the origin of this chapel in the 16th Century: the cemeteries around the city were overcrowded and as the city was expanding so it was decided to relocate the corpses to another location.  The Franciscan monks of Évora decided to give the corpses a more honorable final resting place that would serve a more noble purpose - to educate and warn the local citizens that they too were mortal and should pause in their increasingly wayward journey to think about their mortality.

Since the 18th century until fairly recently two full skeletons were hung from the ceiling.  I read in one of the descriptions of the chapel that this was reminiscent of a legend about a woman cursing her husband and child on her deathbed that their bones would never decay for having treated her badly.

 

These two skeletons are now displayed in glass cases.

Which brings us back to whether these were all murdered Muslim corpses.  The claim makes it seem like the monks deliberately desecrated the corpses of Muslims but it seems they desecrated the corpses of cemeteries without regard for the religion.  The practice of moving bones from cemeteries into ossuaries was common throughout Catholic Europe until recently.

However, multiple articles confirm that 5000 corpses were used in this building and it is true that the Moors occupied Portugal between the 8th and 12th Century.  When the Moors invaded, they gave the cities a choice: surrender, keep your property, faith and autonomy and pay a tax for their unbelief to the Muslim faith, or risk the lives of all the males and risk slavery for the women.

The result was that most of rural Portugal converted to Islam, and the Moors and local people in the cities learned to prosper and live together, Arabic became the main language resulting in over 1000 Arabic words being introduced into Portuguese.  The art, culture and technology that was introduced by the Moors in Spain and Portugal propelled Europe into the Renaissance.

In 1139 the new King of Portugal began to expel the Moors from Portugal, with the help of Christian Crusaders who completed the expulsion.  The Christians didn't show the same tolerance and the once vibrant Muslim communities in Portugal were murdered, expelled or forced to convert to Christianity.  The famous explorer, Vasco da Gama has been accused of waging a war on Muslims in reprisal for attacks on the Portuguese which culminated in his burning a ship full of Muslim pilgrims - a historical fact that isn't often mentioned.

In 2019 a newly found far-right party claimed a seat in the Portuguese government.  They espouse the Christian Nationalist views once held by the autocratic ruler who was overthrown in the Carnation Revolution.  For example they oppose teaching about Islam in public schools and gloss over the conquests and rule of Portugal by the Moors and the Visigoths while focusing on the Christian conquest of the Moors.

This is eerily similar to what we experienced in South Africa growing up, where the ideas of apartheid were espoused as "noble" and "generous". And also more recently to the USA Christian conservative movement's desires to downplay or ban the teaching of historical events that undermine their nationalist views (like slavery and voter suppression and to rewrite some of the significant events in the civil right's movement).  

Despite this somber recounting of history we have been amazed at how welcoming the Portuguese people are of visitors and immigrants.  It is quite amazing to hear open encouragement - like old friends telling you to come over any time.  

And really mean it.