After 23 days working our way down the length of Portugal ( and across the width several times, it’s a narrow country), we returned to Spain today. We took the motorway to the Seville ring road (we’ve been there before so didn’t stop), headed south and visited Jerez de la Frontera to enjoy a trip around the headquarters of Gonzalez Byass, the makers of Tio Pepe and Croft Original Sherry. We are staying on the coast at El Puerto de St Maria tonight from where we can catch a ferry to Cadiz tomorrow. ... read more

After tearing ourselves away from our beautiful campsite, we paid a brief visit to Caldas de Monchique, a nearby small spa town which was also very attractive. Then back to the coast and a short drive east to visit Benagil, a small and supremely picturesque village where our friends Steve and Gill Vere have recently bought a house. A phone call to Gill gave us directions to their place and after climbing over their garden wall we were able to admire the seascape from their roof top barbeque area. The afternoon was spent taking a coastal walk to the east of the village, admiring the many unusual features created by erosion of the limestone cliffs and having a fairly cold swim from one of the beaches. A local restaurant owner allowed us to park the ... read more

We finished the last few kilometres to the south west tip of Portugal on foot by walking along the path above the spectacular cliffs to Cape St Vincent with its lighthouse where we had lunch of hamburger and orange juice from a roadside stall. Then a drive along the coast to Lagos where we took a boat trip amongst the unusual cliff formations just west of there. We retraced our steps a short way and stayed the night at Lux, coincidentally the place where the English girl was abucted. We must have been the only people in Portugal who didn’t know this until we got here. ... read more

The bad news today was that the van had an argument with a supermarket car park sunshade and lost. The good news is that the damage, although severe, will not curtail our trip and with our insurers blessing we are going to continue as planned even though we need to seal with a towel the opening between the top of the sliding door and surrounding bodywork. After the mishap and necessary calls to England we continued east towards the Spanish border to Monsaraz, a remarkable hilltop fortified village with impressive views over the surrounding plains and reservoir created by the recently completed Alqueva dam which provides irrigation and hydroelectricity at the cost of flooding many valleys. The night was spent at Serpa, another walled town which we thought was the most pleasant we have been ... read more

We have spent the last two days seeing something of Lisbon (Lisboa in Portuguese), the capital city of Portugal. The city was severely damaged by an earthquake in 1755 and many of the buildings date from the rebuilding that followed. It is situated on a series of ridges and valleys running down to the river Tejo estuary. The two things which impressed us most is the domestic scale of the architecture, there appear to be no tower blocks perhaps due to fear of another earthquake, and the transport system, particulary the trams which crank up and down the many hills in impossibly narrow cobbled streets. We have used all the available forms of travel, buses, trams, funiculars, lifts, ferries and the underground metro. We wandered through some of the wide streets, open squares and gardens ... read more