Alentejo holiday

First of all, let me introduce myself and my link to Maurício & Hugo of Olympus Passion. Back in October 2018, I signed up for a landscape photography workshop led by Phil Norton, a NiSi filter ambassador, which was actually planned and run by Maurício and Hugo. The location was the ‘Southwest coast of Portugal’.

I was really impressed with the area and being a 4 day photo workshop we didn’t really have much time for exploring the area other than the coastal areas that we visited for photography. So since then I’ve really wanted to revisit the area to spend a bit more time exploring both the coastal bit and further inland. I also thought my wife Sarah would find it all very appealing, and so it turned out.

So in February, I contacted Maurício and Hugo out of the blue to say we were contemplating a trip, and they were very helpful in sending me various guides and videos which were really useful in the planning. At the same time I found a small travel company who do tailor-made tours of a number of destinations on the Iberian Peninsular, including the Alentejo (https://caminos.co.uk/). So we gave them our dates, and they came up with a suggested itinerary. They booked the hotels and the hire car, and we did the flights. We completed the 10-day trip in mid April. The overall impression of the holiday: Fantastic. It exceeded all our expectations. That said, we were really lucky with the weather, 24 to 28ºC degrees each day with hardly a cloud in the sky. And the hotels they’d booked were all excellent, and a bit quirky in different ways. People were consistently friendly, and their English was really good, with one amusing exception, see later. The restaurants, food and wine were really interesting and have a strong regional character. The fish at the coast was exceptional, and the wine really excellent… why don’t we get more Portuguese wine in the UK?!

On our return, I emailed M&H to thank them for their advice with a few of our holiday pictures, and they invited me to put a summary of the trip on their website… so here it is!

This is not intended to be a comprehensive photographic record rather a summary of our holiday with a few pictures included. Most of the pics were taken in the middle of the day and the practicalities of travel with families (or in this case my wife) really preclude getting up really early for spectacular sunrises, and the same for evening light.

For the record, most of these were taken with my usual ‘travel’ camera, the Lumix GX9, with a Pana-Leica 12-60mm lens (which has largely replaced the longer 14-140mm as my go-to holiday lens). I also had an Olympus 17mm F1.8 lens with me for ‘Street’ stuff that I used very little, as well as a polarising filter, particularly useful for the coastal areas. Sarah had her trusty Lumix TZ100.

1. First stop was 2 nights in Lisbon. We stayed at the Alegria hotel, really quite central. Lovely restaurant around the corner from the hotel was As Velhas, highly recommended.

A bit of a disappointment (our fault with date constraints) was that we really didn’t have enough time in Lisbon and I’d liked to have done some more street photography. I guess it means I’ll just have to go back, maybe on my own next time. The other feature was that Sarah wanted to get out to Sintra, which took most of our full day. But it was certainly worth going to, and that train ride gave a different view of the city that we’d not seen before. I’ll give you a small selection of snaps from each stop.

We picked the hire car up from the airport the third morning. An age-old travel tip here that speaks for itself. Cost of taxi to hotel on day 1 was 50Eur!! Cost of Uber back to airport was 13Eur. I’ll say no more!

There’s always a bit of trepidation about driving in a foreign country (or on the wrong side of the road for us Brits). But the driving was actually very easy. As usual, the trickiest bit is leaving and returning to the airport. But having got on to the motorway/highway it was remarkably straightforward. The roads in the Alentejo are really pretty quiet, especially compared to southern UK so the driving was really more of a pleasure. They have a neat automatic toll road payment system as well which means the tolls get added to your hire car bill automatically. And the tolls are low: total bill for the trip was less than 20Eur from memory. En route south, we stopped off for a picnic in a small picturesque town with river and bridges, Alcácer do Sal.

2. Next stop was to the coast. We were staying at Herdade do Touril, a lovely place just north of Zambujeira. In fact, the Herdade was very near Porto das Barcas where M&H had taken us on the photo trip in 2018. There are two nice fish restaurants there, and we went to both. Unfortunately, I missed the sunset because of the monkfish risotto! But that whole stretch of coast is really spectacular, and so quiet and ‘untouristy’. We had a day going to Vila Nova and up and down the coast, and would have liked to do Porto Covo, but time didn’t allow. Everywhere you drive at this time of year, you get the stork nests. The picture of the nest on the coast won a competition for me with my local camera club on my return home.

3. Évora. Again a really nice hotel, Albergaria Do Calvário, well located to stroll into the town. On the trip over from the coast we went through Cercal and then the most beautiful countryside with all the spring flowers in the olive groves. We called into a couple of lovely towns en route, Alvito and Viana. We had a busy day of sightseeing in Évora… a very historic place. There seem to have been quite a few American tourists in the town, but very few Brits. What’s wrong with them?! Apart from Lisbon and Algarve, Southern Portugal just doesn’t seem to figure as a mainstream tourist destination. Maybe I should not complain because the lack of tourists in general adds to the appeal of the place. Restaurants close to the hotel we went to were Fialho (more upmarket) and Taskafina (v good value).

4. Our final stop was Castelo de Vide, up in the hills near the Spanish border, with a short visit to Estremoz en route. The hotel was Casa Amarela, and the first night it seemed like we were the only people there. Virtually no visitors in town either and the hotel guy was saying that they were really suffering from lack of Israelis this year… it’s normally a big destination for them with the Jewish quarter and museum etc. On the first night, we went to one of the (best reviewed) restaurants in town and we were the only people there when we arrived. The menus were on blackboards around the place and it was clear that the proprietor, a lovely guy, had no English. We got by with him drawing us pictures of the dishes, rabbits, partridge etc. We had a great meal, again with lovely house wine. Everywhere we went, in big towns and small, the people were really friendly and keen to help. The level of English speaking was most impressive, maybe expected in the larger towns and hotels but not necessarily in smaller places, bars and shops.

The next day we went to Marvão… WOW. What a spectacular place. It’s the sort of place I’d like to have gone back to at sunset for more pics. A tip to take care here when clambering around on the walls. Lack of handrails etc can make it a bit scary, but it’s a must-see place up in the hills with spectacular views.
After that we went down to the Roman town Ammaia, semi-excavated, a few km from Marvão. Sarah loves that sort of stuff, and again we were the only people there despite the big investment, an EU grant had given them to update the museum to something quite impressive.

That was it for our short tour, and the next day we had an easy ride back to the airport on good roads after a brilliant holiday.

A tour around the Alentejo is wholeheartedly recommended… and Spring is a great time to go. So many unexpected surprises!

Thanks for your inspiration Mauricio and Hugo, and keep in touch!