Have Bag, Will Travel

I have to say that I didn’t have high expectations of Vila Real when we set off to walk there from Monte Gordo on a bright sunny morning but as it turned out I was completely wrong.

 I had forgotten, but was reminded that morning that I had in fact been to Vila Real before a long time ago in 1985 on a few days away on the Algarve and a long drive home with friends.  Due to good December weather we had overstayed by a day in Portugal and  so we planned for a very early start and it was still dark when we left just after five o’clock we surprised the car by piling in and starting it up at an obscenely early hour in the morning.

Even though there was no motorway in 1986 the sixty mile drive to the border was quite straight forward at this time in the morning but the lack of an offsite headlight did make things a little bit precarious at times.   We drove inland for about half the way and then joined the coast road for the final section of the drive towards the border with Spain, which we reached more or less on schedule.

The border with Spain is the Guadiana River and these days a bridge takes the motorway straight across but before that the ferry link between Vila Real de Santo António in Portugal and Ayamonte in Spain was the only way to get across.  There was a slight delay waiting for the next available ferry but nothing too serious and as we took the twenty minute, half mile journey the sun started to come up ahead of us and we arrived in Spain just in time for breakfast.

Anyway, I digress and that is a different story.

So we set out immediately after breakfast and the first part of our walk took us along a modern wooden boardwalk adjacent to the beach and when that stopped along a wide open sandy beach where I collected and filled my pockets with shells.

My blogging pal Jo who lives in nearby Tavira doesn’t like Monte Gordo and she also doesn’t like the boardwalk because it replaced traditional beach taverns with ugly tourist restaurants and I understand that but that I am afraid is the price of progress.  I didn’t like the ugly restaurants and avoided them but in  fifty years or so the boardwalk and the ugly restaurants will have gone and people who remember them will say ” you should have seen this place fifty year ago when there was a fabulous boardwalk and lovely restaurants”

The clock ticks, time moves on and there is no going back…

I was enjoying the gentle walk along the timber but quite suddenly  without warning the boardwalk came to an abrupt end and there was a choice to be made, we could walk along the beach or detour to a looping pine forest stroll.  We liked the beach but the sand was soft hard work so we opted instead for the the forest –  the Mata Nacional das Dunas Litorais  or in English the Coastal Dunes National Forest, planted up several years ago to protect the coast and prevent erosion.

There were a couple of routes so naturally we had a disagreement or two (maybe three or four) and as usual Kim turned out to be right…

So, we walked the forest trail until we came to the industrial harbour and someone we were talking to earlier at breakfast told us that the lighthouse at the entrance to the river was the most southerly point in all of Portugal.  I like these sort of pointless facts so we walked all the way there.  A nice walk along the estuary but it turned out not to be true.  The most southerly point in mainland Portugal is in fact Cabo de Santa Maria near the city of Faro.

So as it turns out I cannot claim to have been to the most southerly point in Portugal.  I have checked this out and neither have I been to the most northerly or the most easterly but I can claim with confidence that I have been to the most westerly at Cabo da Roca…

Read the full story Here…

So, my geography expedition a complete waste of our time we walked back the way that we had pointlessly rambled and then picked up the pace and jogged into the town…

The following morning I tried to find the man that had given us this useless piece of information to put him straight but he was nowhere to be seen – probably checked out and moved on.