Sardinhas e Escadinhas

Or how a quest for the perfect grilled sardines led to discovery of the perfect beach ...

Sardinhas assadas - fresh sardines grilled on charcoal - are a quintessential Portuguese summertime dish, a kind of national signature, as gelato is to Italy or crepes to France. Best eaten outdoors, charred with the taste of a hot smoky barbecue grill, oiled and rock-salted.  


Searching for a particular wooden deck of a particular family-run beach restaurant, simple and rustic, where six years ago we ate sardinhas with a bottle of house wine watching the sun set on the sea ... well, this proved difficult. 


Except that one red herring led us to walk all the way down the Escadinhas (little steps) da Cova Redonda - many, many little cobbled steps, in fact, gently descending to the sea ...

where we found ourselves on a perfect, tiny beach in a cove surrounded by huge rocks to the right ...

and left ...

... cutting it off from the rest of the coastline.

These are the giant, golden rock formations that Algarve beaches are best known for, along with caves, grottos, and the blue-green colours of the sea. 

This seagull barely moved from his high-rise on the rock-face the whole time we were there ...

and with so few people, it felt like being on an exclusive private beach - what luck! ...

This little girl was being towed on her lilo by her father, floating languidly on his back ...

and these two men were chatting as they paddled a little way out to sea ...

A sailor in nautical Breton stripes and white cap motored around the rocks to offer a ride to the caves, but there were no takers (no tourists here) and he sped off ...

We never found the original place from memory, but many escadinhas later, we did find sardinhas (first pic) on a nearby beach, much longer but still uncrowded 

... right here, on a raised wooden deck ...

with these views ...

Did he catch our sardines earlier that morning?

A Portuguese pottery

Outside the village of Porches, on the side of the N125 in what feels like the middle of nowhere in particular, is the olaria or pottery of Porches, in an Algarve farmhouse behind an old iron gate ...

It took an Irish artist, Patrick Swift, in collaboration with Portuguese ceramicist Lima de Freitas, to recognise that an ancient Iberian art form, a ceramic alternative to the porcelain originating from China, was being lost to the region, its craft dying out.

They scoured the region for craftspeople who still had the skills passed down by their ancestors, trained new ones to revive this dying craft, and in 1968 opened this pottery.

The tile mural in the Bacchus bar, a café attached to the pottery, was painted by Swift, but for the rest, the patterns are mostly animals, flowers and foliage typical of the region and are painted on site ...

The technique is majolica (in Italian maiolica), brought to Europe by the Moors via ancient Persia and China - tin-glazed pottery, painted in bright colours on a white glaze.

This, as far as I know, is the same technique used by the very talented ceramicist Gina, over at Art and Alfalfa, who paints in Italian Renaissance style. I thought about Gina when I visited here this week.

I love my bits and pieces of Porches pottery - they're user-friendly (dishwasher-proof) for everyday use, and their colours and patterns remind me of this part of the world.  So while some waited patiently ... 

I grabbed the opportunity to stock up on some more.

Eating out in an Algarve village

Porches is a village a bit inland from the sea, a little too far from the beaches and golf resorts, and a little too peeling and dilapidated to be of interest to most tourists. 

A cluster of houses on cobbled streets surrounds a pretty, white-washed church, surrounded in turn by olive groves, dry and dusty brown at this time of year.

It's the kind of village I remember from childhood summers, and I guess not much has changed here at all for a very long time.

Yesterday evening we walked up these narrow cobbled streets in search of dinner ...

at a place we discovered a few years ago and had happy memories of ...

At O Leão you eat outside in a courtyard or, as last night, on a small rooftop terrace from where you can hear the church bells ring (the church spire is lit up in this pic at top right) ...

One of the nicest places I can think of for summer eating ...


Joyeux Quatorze de Juillet to all who will celebrate today!

Dolphin Encounters

Dolphins have a brain to body mass second only to humans and much greater than any other mammal (see here for why they are proving to be more intelligent the more we study them) ...

... and their brains have a particularly large area for processing emotional information.

They are highly social animals, living in packs, showing a strong sense of unity and close bonds, constantly interacting with each other - touching, chasing, making noises. Babies suckle their mothers' milk for eighteen months and stay with their mothers until they are six years old, at which age the females start to produce offspring of their own.

At Zoomarine in the Algarve yesterday we had a hands-on encounter with these lovely, gentle and highly intelligent  bottle-nosed dolphins in the pictures. They performed tricks for us at the slightest command (small hand movements and soft high-pitched whistles) from their trainer (in blue below) ...

... and willingly allowed us to kiss their snouts and stroke their heads and bellies (natural behaviour amongst themselves) ...

Daughter no.1 tried out the 'foot push' on a surf board, with two dolphins propelling her at speed through the water, each with a nose to one of her heels (you can just see their shadows beneath the surface of the water underneath her ...

and was rewarded with a smiling face and a nuzzle ...






Below, she is whirled around in circles by a dolphin pressing his nose against the palm of her hand ...

And daughter no.2  was treated to a fast ride by two dolphins swimming on their backs as she held on to their flippers ...

Front view as they deliver her to the far end of the pool ...

and swim silently back, two shadows under the water ...

(photo credits: Nicholas B., our spectator; some are photos of photos taken by Zoomarine)

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 ...