Sunday - again!

The last blog post was longer than usual - this one may turn out to be more than you would like with too much text. Remember to click on any photo to enlarge it.

In the last post about our trip to 3 villages, I mentioned passing through an area of cork trees. Unfortunately we didn't stop to get photos of these unique trees, but they did stop the bus briefly to let us see a large storage stack (more than 50 meters long) of cork tree bark, the stuff of cork.

Adjacent is a photo of part of the stack taken through the bus window. We learned that a tree must be about 25 years old before the "virgin" harvest of the bark. This virgin bark as well as the next harvest, 9 years later in Portugal, is generally of poor quality. Apparently in later harvests, again at 9 year intervals, the quality continues to improve. With a requirement of a 9 year wait between harvests one needs to have a lot of trees and be patient and organized in the harvest process in order to make it pay. We also learned that, while several countries produce cork, Portugal produces 50% of the world's cork and about 50% of it is used for bottle stoppers. There are, of course, lots of other uses and for more on cork you can visit http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cork_(material)

An unexpected stop was at the place of the firewater lady in a very small hamlet. Firewater is a high alcohol drink (48% in this place) known as medronho, brewed in rural "mountainous" areas in the northern part of the Algarve. It is usually made by fermenting wild strawberries and in this location under, to me, somewhat surprising conditions. The primary fermentation takes place in open oak buckets and later the distilling process apparently moves to rather ancient looking copper "canisters", for want of a better term, which are connected to other containers by copper tubing. All takes place in a rather dark (no photo) extension of the sales area. A very poor photo of the almost as dark sales area where we were invited to sample the product, is above. There is little light in this room - though there were lights they were not on. You can see the there is much paraphernalia on the walls and hanging from the ceiling including animal traps, an old guitar and some horse harness equipment. Also, to the left is a pile of cork tree bark and in the centre of the photo there is a glimpse of the bottles of "firewater", all looking quite pristine. The tradition is to drink an ounce or so in one swallow. We didn't sample it.

I realize that I have shown a lot of photos of sunsets and sunrises made from the beach, but at the risk of continuing to overdo it, I thought this one from yesterday worth showing.

In my blog on the second full day in Albufeira I mentioned a newly constructed breakwater on the beach and showed a couple photos of same which you can see by clicking here. I have been tempted to climb onto it to see what it looks like on top and what I might see on the other side. Yesterday I did climb it. Above is a photo looking down its length.

Adjacent and below two views of the ocean and shore on the east side of the breakwater. In adjacent photo in the distance, I believe, is the city of Faro, the capital of the Algarve.

Likely no blog posts for a bit. On Wednesday we leave at 6:30am for our 3 day trip to Seville, Gibraltar and Tangier. Hopefully something interesting from there for the next blog post.