We found warm sunshine, welcoming people, granite cliffs and beaches with lovely, crashing Atlantic waves, cheap campsites (and plenty of wild camping opportunities), port wine and some beautiful towns and cities – how could we fail to enjoy it?
Our first stop was at Évora, a pretty and very peaceful little yellow and white town with some impressive old buildings, the ruins of a Roman temple and a still functioning aqueduct.
This was also the first place that we encountered a tourist product that we later saw all over Portugal – a huge variety of things made of cork. There were pot stands and coasters, which we'd expect, but also cork postcards and a huge range of hats, bags, wallets, shoes, belts etc, all made of an incredibly soft cork, which feels just like leather.
After Évora we made a trip through the Parque National da Arrábida, where pretty villages snuggle into rich green forested hills that slope steeply down to the sea. We ate far too much of the local speciality – choco fritos (fried big squid) and spent a night wild camping on a clifftop at Sesimbra with some friendly cats for company. The next morning we visited the old monastery at Cabo Espichel before heading off for Lisbon. The monastery is out on a bare and windswept headland, with clifftop views out over clear blue sea. We both felt there was a distinctly Atlantic atmosphere about this coast – at times there was something of Cornwall about it, but with baroque churches, red tiled roofs, blue wooden fishing boats and palm trees.
Lisbon was a lovely city break for us. It's a busy, lively town with some pretty areas, some ugly, ex-industrial areas, some picturesque but crumbling areas and some stunning monuments. The temperature was perfect when we were there, but in summer, when it's scorching hot, people must be glad that the coast and the mountains are within easy reach. We stayed in the Belem district, by the port, where some of the best monuments are within easy walking distance and the others are a tram ride away.
We caught the tram into the city centre and spent the day wandering, In the evening we ate at a restaurant in the Bairro Alto listening to fabulous live Fado music.
Next we visited the coast again and stayed at a campsite at the seaside resort of Cascais, where it was so warm that we hung out washing out before going to bed and it was dry in the morning. It's very different to February at home!
Then it was off to Sintra for some exercise. Sintra is a very attractive but very hilly place. It was apparently a favourite summer refuge for royalty and their courtiers, so it was crowded with ostentatious houses and palaces, mainly Victorian. There are some very smart mansions and fairytale castles, although many of the fine old buildings are now derelict – they have far more palaces than are needed in a skint twenty first century republic.
We followed signs up a cobbled hill to the Moorish Castle – high in the forest overlooking Sintra. It was rather further, and steeper, than we'd realised but once we'd started we couldn't give up. The castle itself, way up on the crag, has great views over Sintra, across to nearby palaces, the coastal plain and out to sea. It is very restored (Fernando II was very fond of it's romantic ruins) and we had a lovely walk around the battlements. The only disappointment was the lack of a café, but the town made up for that (see the pastry blog).
That night we had planned to visit a recommended free motorhome spot at a famous surfing beach at Ribamar near Ericeria, but the place must have been overwhelmed with visitors and they have put up 'No motorhomes' signs. We carried on until we found a deserted carpark overlooking a sandy cove. We spent the night with the sound of the waves and a hooting owl to serenade us.
Next stop was the spectacular walled town of Obidos where we climbed up and walked around the ramparts. From here we could see the surrounding countryside, but also enjoy the view across the terracotta rooftops of the town - like a mini Dubrovnic.
We spent a couple of happy hours in Obidos before setting off for Fatima where we spent the night in a motorhome parking area only a couple of hundred metres from the cathedral and its incredible shrine complex. As non believers we were rather astounded by some of the things we saw here – in particular the shops selling a mixture of tourist tat and religious stuff. A typical place would sell wax feet and heads to be used as offerings, giant candles, statues of saints and Our Lady (green is popular), Sporting Lisboa football shirts and cockerel tea towels. Once place had wax intestines – I'm sure it makes sense if you're Catholic.
Our final Portuguese city was beautiful Porto. We arrived at Vila Nova de Gaia on the opposite bank of the River Duero, where the wharves are crowded with port wine warehouses and traditional river sailing boats. Our first sight of Porto was the view across the river to the multicoloured town, studded with baroque towers, draped over the hillside and framed by spectacular bridges. Since Porto is a city built on a hillside, our legs got another workout, but it makes for an extremely picturesque landscape.
The wine blog
While in Porto, we obviously had to take a tour of one of the wineries, and sample their products – well it would be rude not to! We were particularly impressed with their white ports – not something we encounter so often in Britain.
Apart from the fortified wines of Porto, Portugal makes a wide variety of table wines – red, white, green and sparkling. Wine shops and restaurants offered a bewildering range of local wines, most of which were completely unfamiliar to us. During our brief visit we made little progress in making sense of it all, but we can say there's plenty of variety and a wide range of quality. The green wine, 'Vinho Verde', is a young dry white wine from the north, slightly sparkling in one restaurant we visited, and very good.
The pastry blog
Pastries seem to have a very prominent position in Portuguese culture and are the subject of much regional rivalry.
In Lisbon we read about a famous cake shop which took over the local monastery's recipe for 'Pasteis de Belem', the most famous version of a famous pastry. The shop and café comprised a warren of rooms, all lined with blue tiles, with big glass windows to see into the kitchens. The pastries were delivered to our table warm from the kitchens; crisp filo pastry cases, browned and buttery, filled with a soft warm custard delicately flavoured with cinnamon. Delicious!
Sintra also had a historic cake shop, selling the local speciality 'Quejadas'. We found the shop easily as it was the one that looked like it hadn't been redecorated in a century and had a big queue of people inside. The quejadas turned out to be small tarts with a dense crisp casing, a sweet mealy (rather than custard) filling with a nicely browned top. We bought some to take away, as well as some puff pastry rolls that everyone else seemed to be ordering, and they came so beautifully wrapped that it seemed a shame to open them.
The puff pastry rolls turned out to be Travessieros, they were encrusted with sugar and half filled with a sweet yellow goo, possibly pumpkin based. Very nice.
And then...
After not quite enough of Portugal we forced ourselves to head back into Spain and off eastwards. We've made our way through the wheat fields of the Castilian meseta roughly parallel to the Duero / Douro river. That route will take us into the Ebro valley and La Rioja, before once again crossing the Pyrenees into France. There's a growing feeling of being on the way home, planning the practicalities of reassembling something like a normal life.
There are some things we're very much looking forward to, but we wonder how we'll manage with the climate, the Olympics, the 60th Jubilee and finding that we understand what the people around us are saying all the time!
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