More beach - the last post from Portugal

Since the beach is a main attraction in Albufeira, we spend as much time as is feasible there. Consequently, there are lots of beach scenes, many good ones.

So here are some more:

Small boy
Soccer on the beach
Wave on rock
Boy with dog
Last day

Lionel - the stone scuptor

We visited our stone carver friend, Lionel, once again and asked him to make another small sculpture for us. When we went to pick up the final version he had not yet placed the eyes in the dolphin so we spent 45 minutes watching him work and learned about how he started stone carving.

He had done wood carving in the past, but in 1999 he and a friend, a painter and sculptor, spent a summer on the beach near Albufeira where he learned stone sculpting from his friend. Because he loves it, he has been doing it ever since. He gathers the rocks from the beach at low tide and carts them home (John and I saw him by chance one morning on his way home with a large stone in a yellow plastic bag).

As he earns little from it he supplements his income doing house painting jobs in the area.

More beach

Second set of beach photos.
R

The beach

As always, click on any photo to see a larger image.

A few photos of some beach scenes in this and the next post.
The first set is children with or without parent; the second set in the next post is just, well, beach stuff.

R

What we do

We spend our days with very limited objectives. We walk a lot, usually 8 to 10 kilometers a day but sometimes as much as 15 or more. We have no car so we walk pretty much wherever we go. As we have little food storage facilities in refrigerator or cupboards, we shop for groceries every couple of days or more. It is about 3.5 to 4 kilometers to the supermarket and back. We buy our bread and wonderful Portuguese treats at a separate bakery about 10 minutes from our rooms, and the wine store and the internet cafe are a 20 minute round trip walk.

I have been getting up around 7 am when I do a bit of organizing of photos and blog preps. Then I spend a bit of time trying to learn some Portuguese. John and I walk every morning from 8:30 to about 9:30; then we have breakfast. Ruth and I have been walking the beach to "old town" mid morning, depending on the tide, where we just stroll around or go to the post office, pharmacy or do a bit of shopping for our grand children (or ourselves), have a fresh squeezed orange juice, coffee or beer at Sir Harry's bar or elsewhere and return home when we feel like it.

The afternoons are time for some photo shoots, water colour painting, reading, naps and general relaxing. Drinks down by the water may happen around 4 or so. Again, depending on the tides, we have been walking the beach again before supper.

In the last few of days Ruth and I have visited a couple of art exhibits in "old town" and at the public library.

Over the next few days we are more heavily scheduled. Tonight we are going out for dinner to one of the nearby large apartment-hotels. On Saturday we are off to the town of Loule, about 40 minutes away by bus, to do the Loule farmers' market, then to a concert at the Municipal auditorium in Albufeira in the evening. Sunday we are going for lunch and music at a local Saxophone Bistro about 5 minutes from our rooms and Sunday evening another concert at the Municipal auditorium.

Plans are developing for a visit to Faro, the capital city of the Algarve province, about 50 minutes away by bus.

The photos are:
1. We walk,
2. We eat or drink,
3. We walk,
4. We eat or drink,
5. We shop.

But we also read, paint, take photos, visit art galleries, the library and the used book store and we go to a concert or two.

It's tough work but we are handling it well and the days too easily slip away.

Albufeira

The next couple of posts will deal with the mundane - first, something about the town where we are staying. Someone asked us what we do here for a month so, in the next posting, a bit about what we do to pass the time here when we are not on a trip to Spain, for example.

Albufeira was once a fishing village but is now essentially a seaside tourist area with a winter population of about 20,000 people and a summer population of perhaps 100,000. Tourist related development is rampant in the area but there are still lovely beaches backed by low level cliffs and the scenic old town spreading up the hillside. And in March the beaches are definitely not crowded. They say that the name Albufeira derives from the Arabic al-buhera meaning castle by the sea, but in Portuguese it means "lagoon" or "dam".

Visitors, especially at this time of year, are predominantly from the UK but there are many from Holland, Germany and Canada. The "old town" retains some of the character of the old village with narrow winding streets, low white buildings, fisherman's beach (a couple of years ago there were colourful Portuguese fishing boats pulled up on the beach, but unfortunately, no longer - they are now hidden in an area enclosed by man made breakwaters) and some excellent walkways and restaurants overlooking the ocean. We have also learned that there are some charming bed and breakfast places to be discovered in unexpected places along the narrow streets on the hillside above the town square. The businesses in the old area are essentially eating places, bars and stores pretty much geared to the tourists.

The photos are:
1. Old town square. On all sides are shops, restaurants, bars and, on the far side of this photo, a very nice little art gallery.
2. Old town, including the square, from a balcony of a charming bed and breakfast place we looked at.
3. Ruth and John on a characteristic narrow street bound for a restaurant for a drink.
4. One of my favorite gates to a Mediterranean style house overlooking the ocean.
5. Characteristic tile roof tops.

More Cordoba

As I mentioned in the previous post about Cordoba, in part of the 14th century Jews, Christians and Muslim apparently lived in peace and harmony in Cordoba during that part of the reign of the Moors. There remains in the city an area of narrow streets with grilled windows and doorways that open onto whitewashed patios and gardens; this street is called "Callo de los Judios" in what was the Jewish neighbourhood during the 14th century. On this street there are also the remains of a very small Jewish bath and Synagogue.

Cordoba was also the birthplace of the philosopher, physician and humanitarian, Moises Ben Maimon, better known as Maimonides. There are at least two statues of Cordoba's famous citizen in the area that we visited.

On our way from Granada to Cordoba we traveled through the largest olive growing area of Spain (the triangle created by Sevilla, Granada and Cordoba) where there are seemingly endless fields of olive trees. We were told that the olives are harvested by placing large sheets of material, now plastic, under the trees then shaking the tree. In earlier times and still on the smaller "farms" the trees were shaken "by hand" with sticks (hard to imagine this process with so many trees); larger growers now use a motorized tree shaker. One reason that some of the smaller growers use the old method is that studies have shown the the mechanized method shortens significantly the life of the trees which, under the old methods of harvesting, live for centuries.

There are in this post another photo of the mosque/cathedral (this one at the junction of the transept and the nave - these arches are likely not of the original mosque), the Synagogue, a couple of the Hebrew neighbourhood we walked through and one of the fields of olive trees.

After a few hours in Cordoba we started on the long bus ride back to Albufeira, Portugal.