Eastern Algarve - Santa Luzia

After leaving Olhão we drove a short distance to Santa Luzia, a tiny fishing village.

We have been here before and on that visit I took a lot of photos of traditional brightly painted Portuguese fishing boats - but I inadvertently took them with the wrong settings on my camera and they were all badly underexposed and, as a consequence, very dark.

I was able to partially recover some of them but the colours were not representative of what I had seen. So this time, I was careful to get the exposure right.

Though the boats were at a dock rather than on the beach as they were last time, which I would have preferred, I did get some quite good photos of these characteristically colourful boats packed with all manner of fishing gear.

Portugal, as an Atlantic country and an historical seafaring nation, has a long tradition of fishing. It is among the countries in the world with the highest fish consumption per capita.

Species like the sardine, Atlantic mackerel, tuna, and the European hake have traditionally been important for the Portuguese commercial fisheries. Another widely used species in Portuguese cuisine is the cod, known in Portugal as bacalhau. Salt cod has been produced for at least 500 years, since the time of the European discoveries.

Before refrigeration, there was a need to preserve the codfish; the ancient techniques of drying and salting keeps many nutrients and the process makes the codfish tastier. Though the Portuguese tried to use this method of drying and salting with several local fish, they found that the method was ideal for fish from much further north.

With the "discovery" of Newfoundland in 1497, Portuguese fishermen started fishing its cod-rich Grand Banks. Thus, bacalhau became a staple of the Portuguese cuisine.

In the 18th century the town of Kristiansund in Norway became an important place of producing bacalao or klippfish which, according to Wikipedia, is still exported to Portugal.

We stayed in Santa Luzia only briefly - maybe 30 minutes at the most - before moving on to Tavira.