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Obrigada!

ESWIL
Jul 1, 2016
2 min read

Apologies I haven't posted for a while but as you can see from our photo we've been on holiday! I’ve no idea why it has taken so long to discover Portugal. Somehow we became regular visitors to Spain, USA and of course France. Naively I believed that Portugal would in essence be just a slightly different version of Spain, but that’s like saying Wales is the same as England.

Oh my goodness this country has amazing beaches, 85 beaches in the Algarve alone carry the blue flag status. And the food, oh the food….. We found a restaurant last year purely by accident – you know when you keep driving looking for a nice place for lunch and then suddenly realise if you’re not careful it will be time for dinner.

It is in a tiny hamlet just south of Aljezur on the west coast of the Algarve. The restaurant reached by a dusty single track road is called Shabouco. Like many restaurants they sell their fish by weight. The chef patron talked to us about the fish on offer, because regular fish is not a given, it depends what the fishermen have landed that morning.

(Image courtesy of www.racheltanurmemorialprize.org)

I need to tell you about Goose Barnacles, or percebes as they are called in Portugese. These are the most amazing seafood delicacy not cheap in a restaurant at £35 per kilo. Cooked simply with herbs and stock like you would mussels they are divine. The barnacles as the name suggests grow on rocky outcrops on the coast and such is their strength they have to be chipped off by hand. They take ages to grow and as a result there are strict quotas on how much can be harvested.

The best oranges are bought at roadside stalls, literally families bagging up the oranges grown in the garden and selling them on. The best place to buy your fruit and vegetables is direct from the farmers and we go to either Loule market on our way out from Faro airport or indeed the farmers market on a Saturday morning in Lagos.

(Image courtesy of Portuguseagarve.com)

Visitor numbers to Portugal are a fraction of Spain and France and part of me wants to keep it that way but then part of me also wants everyone to enjoy this amazing country too.