Walkways

In an earlier posting I suggested noting the patterns in one of the walkways. For example, look at the photo of the walkway by the harbour in Lagos in the post on the Western Algarve - you will see more examples in several photos yet to come.

The first (top) photo shows a rock pattern in the "patio" area outside the back of the place we stayed. This sort of small rock based pattern appears in streets and walking areas all over Portugal. These small rocks, about 2 to 2.5 inch (larger in some areas) rough cut cubes, are still put in place by hand as you can see in the next two photos.

They seem to lay a base of sand like material (it may be limestone screenings or some equivalent) and then workman like these two work with a small hammer in a sitting or squatting position for hours positioning and "tapping" these rocks into place. After they finish a large area they tamp it down either with a hand tamper or with a power tamping machine, pour a sand-like filler over the area, sweep it around to fill in the gaps. The result is a beautiful surface for walking and driving on. There is no hardened grouting material in any of these walkway/streets that we saw.