Portugal:General

...Portugal, I’ll file this under Portugal:General

********************************************************************

I’ve been to Portugal for a two-week holiday four times now over a six year period, the first three occasions, being, not surprisingly, to the Algarve region.

This year, we felt like a change, so we head north to the Douro and Minho areas of the far north – so far north in fact that it ...
...produces port and vinho verde can’t be all bad, can it?

Well no IT can’t but the early August weather is another matter. Please don’t go there expecting the same fortnight of pool- or beach-side laziness that you can get away with in the Algarve. It’s quite definitely an area for the independent traveller who doesn’t expect every single waking hour to be filled with sunshine – I can almost guarantee it won’t be. Bear in mind that this ... more

I’ve tried a couple of times to get a more localised category put on Ciao, but since we have in fact ranged over a sizeable part of northern Portugal, I’ll file this under Portugal:General

********************************************************************

I’ve been to Portugal for a two-week holiday four times now over a six year period, the first three occasions, being, not surprisingly, to the Algarve region.

This year, we felt like a change, so we head north to the Douro and Minho areas of the far north – so far north in fact that it borders Galicia in north-western Spain. After all, an area that produces port and vinho verde can’t be all bad, can it?

Well no IT can’t but the early August weather is another matter. Please don’t go there expecting the same fortnight of pool- or beach-side laziness that you can get away with in the Algarve. It’s quite definitely an area for the independent traveller who doesn’t expect every single waking hour to be filled with sunshine – I can almost guarantee it won’t be. Bear in mind that this coast is known as ‘A Costa Verde’, and it’s also next to ‘Green Spain’, so it doesn’t take a genius to work out what makes it green.

GETTING THERE

The ONE advantage of living near Heathrow, and I do mean ONE, is that occasionally I get to disturb everyone else for a change. Our flights to Portugal’s second city, Porto, were with the national airline TAP Air Portugal, costing around £160 return and taking a shade under two hours. To my amazement, given the time of year, everything went like clockwork, which is more than can be said for the car-hire that we THOUGHT was fully sorted here in the UK by Sun Cars.

EVERYTHING IN THE JARDIM’S NOT SO ROSY

On arrival at Porto, we found that Auto Jardim, Sun Cars’ local agent, had ‘misplaced’ our group 6 car (small with air/con), forcing us into a ‘two seater with air con’ which, it transpired was not a Mazda MX-5 but a Renault Clio van, with some vague promise that they’d upgrade us as soon as possible. As it happens, this is the ideal vehicle to get you and your luggage to the accommodation if there are only two of you. Our problem was that we were travelling as two couples, each with their own car, but insured so we could all drive the same car when we went out together. Our friends initially faired a little better, and got what they’d ordered (Renault Clio 5-door with air/con), only to have it break down a few days later, to be replaced by a similar Clio, or so they thought. On returning in triumph to the villa, we found that the air/con wasn’t working, neither were the reversing lights, one brake light and the windscreen washers. Given the prospect of further wasted day’s holiday and a 200 km round trip, I’m afraid we acquiesced. Our van was replaced AND upgraded with a Ford Focus, which, I have to admit, was very nice to drive and way beyond what we’d specified. It’s all starting to look like Renault Clios don’t stand up to heavy use and/or Auto Jardim have a very odd definition of a pre-delivery check.

Anyhow, that’s the bad news out of the way. Now stand by while the rest of this opinion slides into a ‘morass of positivity’!

WHERE WE STAYED

Our actual accommodation was a villa that slept four couples although only four of us went, which was handy is it gave us two ‘snorer’s sin-bins’ to play with! The quality of the villa, selected via www.vintagetravel.co.uk was exceptional; leaving you feeling more like you’d come off best in a house swap rather than staying in a built-for-rent property. If you’re interested, you can see the ‘O Vergel’ villa at http://www.vintagetravel.co.uk/portugal/18_o_vergel.html.

One look at the high season price of £1695/week would put a lot of people off, but bear in mind that this would be about £200/head if you filled the place, and if you want your own un-shared pool, you have to have a villa. In this case, you also get four bathrooms, satellite TV, a proper hi-fi and a DVD player.

We were situated in the village of Argela, a few miles inland from the riverside town of Caminha, which faces Spain across the Minho river.

Just a word about the ‘idylls’ of village life in Argela; take your sense of humour with you if you expect it to be quiet. We had an amplified church clock that chimed every 15 minutes 24/7, which in turn set off a cacophony of dogs in the surrounding valley, various timed irrigation pumps keeping the grapes alive going off all around us, the Sunday service relayed by speakers to the whole valley (“that’ll teach ‘em not turn up”, thinks the priest), mysterious explosions, which at least had the courtesy not to go bump in the night and a series of mobile deliveries, groceries etc, heralded by the truck driver sounding his horn continuously as he circulated the village. Had it been the mobile library (and there was one) we could at least have gone to the gate and shouted ‘SSSSHHHHH!!!!!’

The nearby town of Caminha was a pleasant experience with plenty of good places to eat (my own personal number one priority), friendly locals, a limited amount of ‘retail opportunities’ (thank God) and all the usual stores that visitors and locals alike need to stock the fridge.

Here’s another one of my ‘just a few words’, this time about Portuguese supermarkets. Probably the most prolific supermarket chains are Pingo Doce*, and Os Mosqueteiros (aka Intermarché) – the French Leclerc chain also has a foothold. There’s nothing odd about them except for a common all-pervading and not very pleasant whiff, which is unusual in this canned and cling-wrapped age. A trip to the fresh produce area soon tracks this down, to a display of salted cod, monopolising anything up to 25% of the floor space as if it’s the centrepiece in Harrod’s Food Hall. Once this smell has hit the nostrils, it doesn’t go away until you drive off deliberately positioning yourself behind a poorly maintained truck just to get a whiff of diesel to flush it out!

*If it were me, I’d rename it Pongo Dossy.

Note: Salted cod is a delicacy from which there is no escape, as it’s popular all across northern Spain too!

On the subject of shopping, don’t expect many people to be English-speaking, as we don’t figure highly in the visitor count, most tourists seemingly coming from France if my straw poll of car plates is anything to go by. This I found rather strange, considering the comparative proximity of the Santander-UK ferry.

GO ANYWHERE INTERESTING FOR LUNCH? YES, SPAIN

One of the delights of staying in the Caminha area was the ease with which you could flit in and out of Spain at will, just for lunch for example. Caminha has what must be the cheapest international car ferry in the world – about €5 to take a car full of adults across the Minho (Wightlink and Red Funnel, eat your corporate hearts out! £86 return to the IOW? What’s that all about then?). It is scheduled to run every 30 minutes, but in reality it’s a lot more frequent than that – basically they leave when it’s full, which is every 15 minutes in summer, but be warned, it’s not very big; about the same size as the Sandbanks ferry across Poole harbour entrance or a little larger than the Windermere ferry if you know it.

Alternatively, you could drive up the south bank of the Minho to Valença where the first bridge crossing to Spain can be found, and just drive into Spain via Tui. It was interesting to see the old border posts now slowing rotting away. I suspect the Caminha ferry is a newer operation since there are not really any signs of old border controls.

I fully expected being in Spain to change things completely, but even place names and certain local spellings (in Gallego?) look extremely Portuguese, like the prolific use of ‘O’ and ‘A’ instead of ‘El’ and ‘La’ as the definite article. It’s almost as if ‘Portugueseness’ just kind of fades away rather than having a distinct demarcation. Once in Spain, the delights of the Galician coast are obvious – it’s much more rugged, like north Cornwall, with dramatic Atlantic breakers smashing onto rocks, in our case, just outside the window of our lunchtime venue, the Rocamar Restaurant near Baiona.

‘THE LEVER’S COME OFF’

Firstly, as I’ve implied before, some knowledge of Portuguese is a distinct advantage if only the written word for menu purposes, which mercifully conspire to be similar in many ways to Spanish. Even then, Portuguese does have several oddities, which can trip you up. For example, just when you’d got used to squid being something like ‘calimares’ in most Latin languages, it somehow manages to be ‘lulas’, pronounced loo-lash. Likewise, words with an ‘l’ in them in Spanish frequently wash up on Portuguese shores with an ‘r’ in them, hence white wine is branco, beaches are praias, and squares are praças. ‘Thank you’ is ‘obrigado’ (or obrigada if spoken by a woman), literally ‘obliged’.

Words ending in ‘o’ are pronounced more like ‘oo’, and as you’ve seen, some words ending in ‘s’ are more like ‘sh’. Words beginning with ‘R’, which is unfortunate if looking for an address in ‘Rua de Whatever’ sound more like a long H sound with a hint of R tucked in. Try saying ‘horrible’ and now say it without the ’o’ in it to get a feel for the sound of it.

Unlike Spanish, the ‘e’ on the ends of words are frequently missed off, although there are regional differences. Unfortunately for me, I learnt my Portuguese from a Brasileiro….ooops.

The other thing you notice about Portuguese is how truncated and low-key everything sounds compared to the phonetic purity of Castilian Spanish. Some Spaniards I know joke that the Portuguese only do it to annoy them, but I’m not so sure – it has to be said that it is a very different language to listen to, although a lot of written vocabulary is the same or similar.

My paragraph title? Ah yes - I can thoroughly recommend the Collins Portuguese Phrase Book And Dictionary, ESPECIALLY if you want to say ‘the lever’s come off’ which is OK I guess, but these things never go the extra mile for me, with useful adjuncts like ‘but I fixed it myself with a self-tapping screw - there is no charge.’

THAT ‘DRIVING IN PORTUGAL’ THING

Now then, here’s a little riddle for you. What is it that turns the normally affable polite Portuguese who’d never dream of forgetting their ‘Faz favors’ and ‘Muito obrigrados’ in company, into homicidal/suicidal maniacs?

Answer? The car in front, more the point YOUR car in front. They really do HAVE to overtake you, in no matter how inappropriate a spot, and then once they’ve shot past you almost taking your wing mirror off, they frequently slow down to your speed again. It must be some sort of ‘elbow room thing’. In other ways, they’re pretty good, especially it comes to a ‘one in, one out’ policy from side turnings. At first, all the horn-sounding can take you aback, especially as we tend to use them as a ‘gun substitute’ here, but they really do use them to warn you of their presence, which is of course correct.

In general the main roads and motorways in this area are smooth and not particularly busy by UK standards. However bottle-necks do occur, most notably for us at Viana do Castelo, a coastal town still waiting to be by-passed by the IC-1 motorway that heads north from Porto. It wasn’t until our last day when we had hours to spare that we ventured into the place only to find what a nice leafy traditional town it was. The rest of the time was spent avoiding the two underpasses in the town centre.

THE FOOD/EATING OUT

At first, being told that the area’s speciality was ‘Caldo Verde’, or cabbage soup to you, I wasn’t thrilled to say the least. Phrases like ‘the winter evenings must just fly by’ come to mind. However, the proximity to the sea, in this case, the Atlantic Ocean, brings other delights to lovers of fish (pescados) and sea-food (mariscos). A favourite fish is sea bass, which comes as Robalo (big cross-cut steaks from a BIG one), or the dimunutive Robalinho, a whole small sea bass, about rainbow trout sized. If you see the word 'Espetada' on the menu, it's a skewered kebab which are often served on a sort of gallows hanging over your plate so that you slide the contents downwards - very civilised but prone to getting cold quickly! Don't be surprised if the vegetable selection is more 'northern Europe, i.e. boiled potatoes, runner beans etc. It's a few hundred miles to the Med from here, although they do still like their olives (azeitonas).

I don’t think we once went to what you’d class a bad restaurant and prices ranged from just below UK prices to well below what we’re used to paying. Along with the cabbage soup comes another speciality, which we at first thought was lightly sweated fresh spinach tossed with garlic and sesame seeds. Imagine the surprise to be told it was turnip tops and very nice they were too (if you like spinach, that is).

Portuguese restaurants operate a kind of variable cover charge, depending on how many of the pre-main-course tit-bits laid out before you that you eat. It therefore follows that starters are not exactly needed. At one place we were served little scallop pastries, sautéed bell peppers, baby sardines (like white-bait), local cheese, mushrooms in cream, olives, a variety of bread and stuffed courgettes. I do remember looking aghast at everyone else as it dawned on us that the main course was still to come. Each of these cost us about €1 each. Portions here are on the homelier side of large, so caution is advised to anyone trying to come home the same weight as they left, although it’s mainly very healthy stuff – just a lot of it.

Local wines obviously feature the famous ‘green’ wine, ‘vinho verde’ quite highly, but bear in mind that the reference to green relates to the comparative rawness of the wine, and it’s actually possible to get ‘green’ reds, which I imagine to be like Beaujolais Nouveau. Some of the ‘VV’s are indifferent, being little more than a grape-flavoured fizz although others are excellent at what they do, i.e. refresh you and they accompany sea-food brilliantly. Alvarinho with 12.5%ABV is a good full-bodied fruity example as is Muralhas de Moncão, which can be had in a supermarket for around €3.50. Some other whites from the same Douro region that gives us port are excellent, especially Quinta Da Cidra, a chardonnay.

I get the impression that Portugal, being a relatively low volume wine producer, keeps all the best stuff for domestic consumption, as, with the exception of port (obviously), Mateus Rosé (ugh!), Aveleda Vinho Verde, and the red Dão, we never seem to hear of them.

GETTING AROUND

Most public transport in these climes heads north-south along the coast, there being a railway line of the national Caminhos de Ferro de Portugal (CP) emanating from Vigo in Spain and continuing onto Porto via Caminha and Viana do Castelo. Other train services tend to radiate outwards from Porto in the south of the region, terminating in such spots as Barcelos, Braga and Guimarães (didn’t they play some Euro 2004 matches there?). The Caminha service is not very frequent, say a few in each direction every day but the nearer you get to Porto, the better it gets. We went to Porto via the town of Lousado, using its new station’s carpark, and jumping a train there having only had to wait about 15 minutes on spec. The fare to ride the almost new swish electric train into Porto’s São Bento station was €1.25 each way for a 30-minute journey!

VOCÊ TEM UM ANORAK?

Another reason for an ‘enthusiast’ like me to go by this route is that Lousado also has a railway museum, dedicated to the old metre-gauge trains that operated here until the line was cut over just in time for Euro 2004. I know enough Portuguese to realise that I’m being told that all the exhibits are marked in Portuguese only, and that there’s no English guide. However, nodding in all the right places got me into hotter water, as I was then treated to a 30-minute diatribe into how each line had been converted, one kilometre at a time. I then compounded the felony by asking a ‘train-spottery’ type question in Portuguese and the whole process started all over again, only in more detail this time.

Thus Green’s Third Law Of Foreign Languages evolves – when abroad, NEVER sound like you know what you’re talking about in their language.

There are coastal bus services that run, ‘quite littoraly’ (geddit?) along the coast. The rest of the time, you are going to be rather dependant on a hire car.

PLACES TO VISIT IN THIS AREA

There’s not intended to be any specific significance to any of these except that they are places we’ve been to.

PORTO – no visit to the northern regions of Portugal can be regarded complete without a visit to the city of Porto, home of the famous fortified wine know to us as Port. It lies near the estuary of the Douro river, and sits mainly on the north bank. The famous warehouses of the port shippers with household names like Sandeman and Dow do in fact lie on the south bank in the town of Vila Nova de Gaia, and it comes as something of a puzzlement to find that there’s no sign of them on an actual map of Porto. We spent a day there, having arrived by the splendid São Bento station, with its tiled murals in the main ticket hall. This is a largely suburban terminus nowadays, serving medium to short distance lines like the Braga, Guimarães and Valença. The next stop, a through station at Campanhã handles the express traffic like the swish Alfa trains to Lisbon and through trains to Spain. Both Spain and Portugal share the same ‘Iberian’ gauge of approx. 1.68 metres, which is fortunate, but not fortunate enough to be the same as the rest of Europe, which includes us (for a change).

It’s a short downhill walk to the waterfront from the station (remember that when returning loaded down with port bottles), and once by the Douro, you are treated to a magnificent view of the river, the wine shippers opposite and the famous combined hi/lo level bridge, which conspired to be wreathed in scaffolding the day we went, but the odd shape is still discernable. As expected, the waterfront cafes are quite expensive but not a ‘Champs Elysées’ style rip-off, and after all there’s the view to consider, as the traditional wine barges, now given over to circular river trips, ply the water which can look quite rough with a fair amount of white water in places.

I found the tours of the port shippers quite predictable, and sanitised. The Sandeman version, is I believe, the only one conducted in English but I’m ready to stand corrected. Of course, demos are not all that this bank is about – there are numerous wine outlets actually selling the stuff. It’s not a bad idea to stock up on white port since this is harder to get in the UK – I’m told the French take the lion’s share. If I’m honest, I didn’t see too much else of Porto (after lunch), and it had the good fortune of being viewed on a brilliant day. I’m guessing that it could look quite drab in the wet or on just dull days, since many of its side streets could do with a damned good scrub. However, there’s a historic close-knit feel to the place with very little sign of its heart being ripped out to make way for modernity. The Portuguese flags hanging from nearly every balcony helped make it look more colourful, although as with England flags trailing from cars weeks after Euro 2004, clearly the news hadn’t reached here either, although to a certain extent they had more to be proud of, and for longer!

BRAGA – We didn’t so much visit Braga but rather look down on it from a great height. Braga is actually the Minho province’s capital, with a reputation for religious fervour, and this in one of the most devout Catholic nations in Europe. Braga is famous throughout Portugal for the ‘Bom Jesus’, which far from being the site of a miracle, is actually a baroque folly put there by the vertically-challenged local Archbishop, for no better reason than its lofty hill-top makes a great place for a church, and for penitents to crawl up to on bended knee, all several-hundred steps of it.

People with clear consciences and infidels use the water-powered funicular, which by some strange quirk of fate, is exactly what we did, since we just happened to have the €1 fares ready and it would have been a shame to put them back in our wallets. The view from the top is astounding in how far you can see from up there, back to the coast, up to Spain; it really was a sight to drink in. Annoyingly, it is very difficult to get a shot of the stairs without some other ‘poser’ lolling all over them, and it rather destroys the symmetry.

PONTE DE LIMA – Another little treasure of a riverside town, sited by the first upstream bridge on the River Lima. The whole foreshore below the bridge is used for parking, market days and just generally enjoying yourself, including the odd game of keepie-uppie and picnics. The roman bridge itself is very attractive, and there’s a lovely cool leafy atmosphere to the Alemeda (avenue) above the foreshore. We didn’t stop long enough to explore its cobbled streets but it was very restful, and at the same time interesting to the see the high water marks at second storey window level and momentos of various floods, like the photos of the café we sat in, only this time it was almost entirely under water. Oh yes, and excellent double expressos with a VERY naughty sticky pastry cost around €1.50.

MONCÃO – This is quite literally a border town, having been fortified to keep Spain out. I found the traffic-free walk on the city wall ,with Spain just across the Minho (which has narrowed by the time it gets here), very restful, and the river itself is idyllically quiet with just a few eel-fishermen casting nets from both countries; the silence only broken by the occasional train on the Spanish bank. Inside Moncão, things liven up considerably, with a horde of pavement cafes bordering a fine square, surrounded by unmistakably Portuguese buildings, at least above ground floor level they were (I do find we tend all too often to fail to look up when in a built-up area). Anyway, they all somehow conspired to look like something off the label of a bottle of Mateus Rosé.

A GUARDA - (or la Guardia, in Spain). – This is the nearest Spanish town to Caminha being only a couple of miles from the windy car ferry dock on the other side. Incidentally, don’t be tempted to go over as a foot passenger - there’s nothing there but the ticket office and the prospect of Caminha on the other side. Once in A Guarda (local spelling), you are treated to a fairly picturesque but active fishing harbour, with free parking on the jetty. Come to think, parking everywhere in either country was free. ‘Ain’t nothing going on but the lunch’ - We didn’t really do much here, except when Ruth found a ‘quality gift shop’, then it was only me that was doing nothing! Then of course, there was lunch, which turned out to be one of the finest seafood meals I’ve had, all with a sea view thrown in, plus the chance to practice a bit of Spanish, which mercifully, I’m better at. Damn, the waiter spoke English!

LIFE’S A BEACH – Who says? As you’ve no doubt noticed, I’ve not mentioned beaches – this is because I can’t bear being on them although I’ve no objection to looking at them, what with all that getting oiled up and then covered in gritty sand in places you’d rather not. Besides which, out and out sun-bathing is bad for you, and how’s a lad going to keeping his school-boyish good looks if his skin looks like a rhino’s arse? I work outdoors plenty during the spring so the impetus to try and get brown just isn’t very strong in me. The long sandy beaches along this ‘Costa Verde’ are however very good, as long as you realise that it’s the Atlantic your about to dip your toes in, and it’s invariably windy and unsupervised.

CONCLUSION

Well that about wraps up my holiday diary for northern Portugal. In fairness, the weather was unseasonably bad in parts, although the splendidly fine days did recompense us somewhat, as did the dense forests and mountainous scenery en-route to the various places we visited.

It’s a slightly offbeat destination for people who can’t stand being surrounded by Brits on holiday, but don’t expect to be understood everywhere.

Don’t forget – it’s ‘green’ for a good reason.

Would I go again? Yes, definitely, but perhaps including it with a motoring holiday of Galicia in Spain, neither of which are a million miles from the Santander ferry.

Admit it - how many Ciaoers do you know who could work a self-tapping screw into an op on Portugal? When you get to my age you have to get your kicks any which way you can!
 

...less