This time last year, I was in the Algarve, in the south of Portugal. Still under embargo, I couldn’t physically go anywhere in the world, but my travel-loving heart flew to my old stomping grounds for a revisit.
The Algarve region in southern Portugal is on every bucket list with its unique golden jagged rocks and endless turquoise beaches. We travel by pirate ship along these rocky cliffs, which were formed over 20 million years ago, and switch to small boats to access sea caves and beaches inaccessible from land. The most famous of these is the Benagil Cave. The entire cave is domed, with a circular hole broken at the top, casting sunlight in to illuminate the layers of folds of rock inside. You can’t help but marvel at the ingenuity of nature’s creations.
What do you eat in the Algarve, you ask? I say seafood for the main meal and fruit for a snack. The most popular fish eaten by the locals is sardines. The sardines here are several sizes larger than those packed in a can. The locals sprinkle them with large grains of sea salt and grill them over an open fire. They also make a puree sauce for the sardines and serve it on slices of toasted bread. There is also a southern Portuguese style seafood pot (Cataplana) where various seafood is stewed in a tomato sauce with potatoes or groundnuts. If you can’t decide what to eat, there’s a seafood platter or a seafood (rice) dish cooked in an iron pot, there’s something for everyone. There are also the sweetest oranges in the whole of Portugal, figs growing randomly along the roadside, tomatoes the size of my head, and big, purple carrion.
The south of Portugal is a treat for the eyes and the mouth, as well as feeding your spirit. When we think of Portugal nowadays, apart from Cairo, it is probably its glory in the age of great voyages. The hero of the Portuguese discovery of the sea route was Prince Enrique, and it was in Lagos in the Algarve and in the south-west corner of the continent, at Cabo Sao Vincente, then the end of the known world, that he began his voyaging career, deploying and directing his captains and crews to Africa to discover Guinea, Senegal and Sierra Leone. But later the Portuguese crown was driven by the huge profits from the search for gold and the black slave trade, and the great voyage of discovery turned into the conquest and plundering of Africa by force, as well as the establishment of Europe’s first slave market in Lagos. After Enrique, more Portuguese and European navigators took off: Diaz rounded the Cape of Good Hope at the southern tip of Africa; Da Gama continued north from the Cape of Good Hope to the East with its spices and gems; Columbus thought he was in India; Amerigo went there too and published a book correcting Columbus’s mistake, saying that it was not India but a “new continent”. continent”. The rest is history.
The rest is history. What else do you want from a trip to the Algarve, with its stunning scenery, pleasant climate, rich history, great food and warm people?
