Beach holidays then and now

For a fair chunk of my childhood living in Portugal, summer holidays were spent in a small house in the fishing village of Armacão de Pera in the Algarve.

Amongst the images imprinted in my memory are whitewashed houses with red tiled roofs and chimneys, dry brown landscapes, donkeys, wizened and bent old ladies dressed in mourning black from head to toe, miles and miles of sandy beaches, giant rocks, colourful fishing boats, seagulls, and of course the sea - in fact, the cold blue Atlantic  - from which you could imagine seeing North Africa in one direction, or North America very far in the other. 

Today Armacão de Pera is almost unrecognisable - it's a full-on tourist development, from posh resorts to sea-fronting apartment blocks. But the beach is much the same, still dotted with fishing boats and a good mix of locals and tourists.

This friendly 'captain' gave me a double thumbs up as I took this photo, but was disappointed when I declined the offer of a trip to the coves and grottos ...

Instead we hired a couple of colourful cabanas with loungers facing the sea ...

Curiously, almost all the life-guards and beach vendors I chatted to (including the one below) were Brazilian, not Portuguese ...

Tractors are still used to haul fishing boats into and out of the sea, a spectacle people gather round to watch ...

My one disappointment was that the beach vendors no longer sell farturas - fried choux pastry, a kind of light-as-air doughnut in a thin spiral shape, coated in cinnamon and sugar. An older man told me that a few summers ago he'd seen the last seller of home-made farturas, still warm, in a straw basket hoisted over his shoulder.

Taking a long walk down the beach later on (this is one of the longest stretches of beach in the Algarve) we saw young Ronaldos in the making, practising their moves ...

... and even younger ones ...

These kids were chasing each other with spades in a dispute over a sand castle ...

But here's something you'd never have seen back in the day - at a trendy beach bar, you could plop down on bright beanbags dotted on the sand under woven umbrellas, for a chilled caipirinha perhaps ...

treat yourself to a massage in a custom-made tent ...

or even - how cool is this - get comfy on a four-poster bed while watching the sunset ...

I guess progress has its compensations ...