She Says - A place to return to…

22-23 August
We’ve had a wonderful day exploring today, and on its last day Portugal has shown us its best sights. Following the raving review in our tiny fraction of guidebook, we had saved visiting the walled towns of Castelo de Vide and Marvao until the end, as they are near the border of Spain. We planned to take an easy day travelling the 100km from Evora to Portalegre (not far from the towns and the only place camping was noted), visiting some prehistoric burial tombs and cave art on the way. Unfortunately, this was a major bust! The cave was closed for apparent improvement works (though no signs of these actually starting) and the burial chambers were either non-existent, or possibly were next to the road with no further signage or obvious access! We made one more attempt to find a tomb in the middle of a lake, but couldn’t even find the lake!!! As I was still feeling a bit off, we decided to get ourselves to Portalegre, stopping in Estramoz for lunch as it seemed like a reasonable distance away and large enough for lunch supplies. Turns out it was a great place to stop! It was a walled city, fairly large and, as seems to be the way here, completely uninhabited. We drove in through a really cool gate and right into the middle of the Saturday market. We had a brief wander around, enough to see part of the city and get to the castle and wall. It was a really nice town, quiet but very hot, and while I felt ok, we thought we should move on to camp.

We reached Portalegre and picked up groceries from one of the many large supermarkets conveniently located near the highway turnoff. We then got completely lost trying to find the campground. Campgrounds are usually very well marked in Portugal, but we found only one sign. When we finally did work out where to go (thankyou GPS and gut instinct), we found the campground had closed! Thankfully, two industrious campgrounds right near the towns we were planning to visit had posted up their details, including GPS waypoints. We were immediately attracted by one that called itself a rural camping site, because even though our recent camping experiences have been good, we will always go for somewhere out of the way! Trying to follow the GPS once we reached Castelo de Vide and find the right road to take out of town, we ended up going right through town and its twisty, windy, very very steep, cobbled streets! At one point, Xander had to make a 90-degree turn down a steep slope – I thought we were going over! We made our way out the other side of town and tried to find a road that would take us where we needed. We ended up following small brown wooden signs for some megaliths, Xander even getting carried away and running us down a farm track, but it was getting late and we really needed to find this campground!!!

Making our way back into town, we tried again, found the right road, and followed the GPS right to the campground. It looked like there was probably a well sign-posted route if we had taken a different road from Portalegre, but who cares - we made it! And it has been so worth it. Run by a Dutch guy (who can speak every language as they always can!) and his partner, the campsite is located on their organic farm. It’s quiet, they run on solar power, drinking water comes in 5 litre jugs from the nearby spring, food and drinks run on an honour system, and they have TOURIST INFO!! I’ve found it very difficult to get information on areas outside cities, whereas this campground has booklets and leaflets for the whole area, including walking paths between towns and even megalithic sites (another reason for visiting this area). While the tourist office in Marvao today also supplied good (similar) information, Castelo de Vide did not. There seems to be a strange thing here to not really give information and yet somehow this campground has it? Maybe you have to ask the exact right question in the tourist offices and they’ll dig it out for you, but nothing was ever obvious except stuff to buy. We also happily met some old friends in the campground - the stars and Milky Way!! Even though we were able to see stars in big cities like Birmingham over the past 4 years, you don’t realise how many millions of them are out there. Being away from Australia’s low population and light pollution for so long, I had forgotten all about the Milky Way till I saw it glowing right above me. There are no cities around here, only small towns and very little traffic – wow. We finally found a campground just like home!

All along the Portugal-Spain border are settlements like the two we visited today, made from stone and in strategic locations to fight against the Moors, before being overtaken by them. Marvao was my favourite town, ‘the nest of eagles’, perched high on a hilltop with views all around, a castle to explore (for free!), small lanes, and cool architecture (solid stone doorways and carved arch windows) that I haven’t seen since the day we arrived in Portugal and had lunch in a tiny hilltop town. This tiny town houses only a few hundred people, and a good number of tourists. It was still incredibly quiet, in fact the busiest it got was inside the castle tower, and at a restaurant for lunch (we’re getting a little more relaxed about food now, wanted to celebrate our last day here, but also there were no shops for basic snack food!). Castelo de Vide was very nice and very different. Located lower but still on a hill, it had several different quarters, including the twisty windy Jewish quarter and the medieval city inside the old castle. Originally built in the 13-14th centuries, the castle and city walls were refortified and enlarged in the 17-18th centuries, enclosing the full city as it was at the time – it’s not much bigger now. Slightly run down, but surprisingly cleaner in the medieval town (helped by enhancement works although these seem to have stalled – a common occurrence in Portugal), Castelo was really charming and made for good photos. Well, attempts anyway, light is not always on our side! Light, now there’s a thing – always sunny, always blue, it’s been heaven! We’re learning to deal with biking in the accompanying hot weather, and we’ve had excellent training for our upcoming African adventure. We had gorgeous golden light tonight as we explored the nearby prehistoric burial tombs (really good examples) and a giant 7m tall standing stone. It took a bit to find each site - even though signs were provided, they were very small and not always obvious from every direction - but we got there in end!

We could easily spend more time in this area, there’s so much to see and walks to do. However, we will move on tomorrow so we can visit Merida, a Spanish town covered in Roman ruins and relicts, before heading to Seville and our scheduled meet-up with some people near Malaga to collect our new tyres. Portugal has been hard to love, with few attractive small towns, people that are not quick to smile or even interact (the number of times we’ve said hello to people staring at the bike only to get blank looks in return!!), and very aggressive drivers (comparable to Britain), but certain areas are really stunning and we both feel it’s a place we’d like to visit again with the benefit of hindsight!

Wildlife of Portugal – there’s not much to tell! Bird life has been very poor, in fact the best stuff has been in the last two days with small birds here in camp, and the gorgeous bee-eaters that we’ve seen on powerlines and flying around the walls of Marvao. We’ve only seen these beautiful multicoloured birds once before, in a sand-bank nesting colony we stumbled across in Romania last year. We spent ages watching birds soar back and forth below the Marvao castle, desperately trying for a half-decent photo. We’re back in vulture country now and have seen a few, plus a number of other birds of prey across country, but so few small birds. I finally saw a European snake, inside Castelo’s medieval city; unfortunately, it was rather dead and broken into two pieces. We’ve seen a few lizards, including a bright green one today, and lots of bugs. There’s always ants, they get everywhere and are a variety of shapes and sizes, but last night I had a freaky spider crawl on me in the tent – weird 4-way jaws and a long, thin, brown body, ergh.

I’ve been meaning to make some note of the agriculture in Europe, as it’s been quite interesting. In northern France, we saw very small farms, even strip farming like we had previously only seen in Romania. Over there, these were the farms of individual families, and I have to wonder if it’s the same in France? As we moved south, the farms grew larger. Plenty of grain crops were being grown, and there were very few livestock. Not surprisingly, there were plenty of vineyards in certain areas. In Spain, agriculture took place on a larger scale, with the produce more mixed (fewer grains, more corn and fruit trees). There were a lot more cattle, including the black fighting cattle. They were also very big on wind farming and solar panel farming!!! In Portugal, there was little evidence of agriculture for foodstuffs. On the eastern border when we first arrived, it was again like Romania, but because every family home had a large garden of mixed plants for their own supply, including fruit trees. Closer to Lisbon, we saw more plantations of olives and fruit, and of course the wine growing region of Douro Valley was full of vineyards. Cork oak plantations were scattered all over the country. There were LOTS of eucalyptus plantations, more so in the central region and around Lisbon, to the point where we swore we were back in Tasmania at times! It’s been some years since I left Tassie’s forestry industry, and was very strange seeing land clearance and felling operations on this scale again.