Archive for March 20th, 2010

We didn’t know much about Portugal before we came; we hadn’t found a book written by an ex-pat journalist or academic who had moved here for the good life and was keen to publish his thoughts on the ups and downs of life in this country on the edge of Europe. Consequently, Portugal keeps surprising us and often enchants us.

We have found out for ourselves that the Portuguese feel that the Spanish treat them as backward neighbours, they learn French and English at school, the country does not close down for three hours for siesta and people eat at what the British would consider reasonable hours. The Portuguese tile everything and prefer to build new houses, rather than live in a rustic cottage, all supermarkets smell like fishmongers, due to the amount of salt cod on sale, every café and restaurant has a TV switched on constantly, even if you go out for a meal in the evening.

This lack of fore-knowledge also means that we find tourist sights that were not on the must-see list. The dinosaur footprints near Tomar are an amazing treat, not even covered in our Church-obsessed Rough Guide. The Sauropod footprints are the oldest in the world and the best example; there are a number of tracks of different animals and you can clearly see the prints of their large back feet and smaller front feet. We paid two Euros each for the privilege of visiting the limestone quarry where these footprints were found in 1994; visitors are trusted to walk close to the tracks without damaging them, giving you an opportunity to have a good look. To see something so rare, made 175 million years ago and found by chance is an experience we will never forget. We don’t regret by-passing Rome, but overlooking these footprints would have been to miss an awesome experience that puts the present in to context and that we will never forget.

Water features are everywhere in Portugal; decorative fountains in the towns and in the middle of roundabouts and features to provide water to homes and industry. Facing the Atlantic, water is not as scarce as it is in much of Spain, but it is still clearly a managed resource; the newspaper has a list of reservoirs and what capacity they are at every day. These reservoirs, or Barragems, are dotted around the hilly areas of Portugal; many of these are vast lakes, spectacular country roads cross them and hug their shores and they are widely used for water sports and fishing.

In the villages you can still see water features from the time when there was no running water in people’s homes; most villages still have communal taps with tiled surrounds or village pumps, Carol is getting some exercise turning the mechanism for the pump in a village near Poco Redondo. In the fields mechanical water pumps for agriculture are disused and rusting; on walks we pass old wells with no fencing around them just waiting for someone to fall in and the remains of old water wheels can be spotted. Towns often have a large water tower, sometimes colourfully decorated; the water tower in Poco Redondo was painted pastel pink.

Evora and Serpa both had a fine aqueducts and the Convento de Cristo in Tomar, the HQ for the Knights Templar, has a 7 km long aqueduct built in the 17^th Century to provide water to the Convento. This impressive monument is built high above the valley and, typically for all of main-land Europe, you can walk along it without the benefit of a hand-rail.