Bom dia! Good day! Learn some Portuguese with me, praia means beach, the plural -s is pronounced sh. I want to tell you about the ones belonging to Ferragudo, a village in the Algarve, the southern region of Portugal, situated opposite Portimão, one of the bigger tourist centres west of Faro (where the international airport is).

Between the big bay and this one there are several smaller ones that can only be reached when the tide is low, we discover them later and a family having a picnic on one of them, they’ve come by boat and stay on the sand as long as the tide is out.

We see mainly Portuguese people, foreign tourists either stay in their hotel compounds at the swimming-pools or swim in the sea and then walk back to their hotels or hire a car and explore the hinterland. We already studied the Portuguese during two stays in Lisbon and found them the quietest and best behaved of all Romanic peoples. The same number of Neapolitans on a beach and your ears would hurt! The beach is rather clean, every 50 m there’s a bin and every morning some men collect the rubbish and rake the sand.

Why should there be a fortress on the beach? Why should there even be two fortresses? Right opposite the water stands its partner; now we come to the peculiarity of the beach of Ferragudo, it doesn’t face the open Atlantic, it’s the bank of the mouth of the river Arade, a wide mouth of about 500 m looking like a long bay stretching inland from the sea. The two fortresses used to protect the mouth and the incoming ships going up the river to the town of Sagres.

Talking to the locals is a good thing, but we had a conversation which we’d rather have done without. A man said that tourists sometimes maintained that the water was not clean because they saw dead fish floating in the water, the reason for that was, however, that the fishermen cleaned their catch returning from a night of fishing and threw the fish they didn’t want to keep overboard. I deffo dislike encountering dead fish when swimming, no matter why they’re in the water! Fortunately the fish I saw when I went swimming the fist time was alive and kicking, in fact it jumped out of the water, maybe it was happy to see me! (Later I saw two dead fish lying on the beach washed ashore by the tide)

I’d recommend visiting the small church on the top of the hill, when we entered, classical music started playing, not religious one, rather unusual. Have a look at the statue of Mary and baby Jesus in a niche in the wall outside, it’s primitive art and looks quite funny. Strangely, Baden-Powell has got a memorial in front of a church, an iron anchor, can’t interpret this.