Heading South(Roy Orbison) - Evora to Milfontes,Portugal

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As we expected our east facing room in Evora gave us a lovely sun rise even if it did mean we woke a bit earlier than we might have wanted to.

For once a hotel room has an electrical plug right next to a door we can open and so if the toast burns a bit it won’t set off the smoke alarm and do a Cumbernaud on us!

Sunday morning in Evora was very quiet with just a few locals up and about, those going to church, and a few tourists like us.

We hadn’t got close up to the aqueduct yesterday so before heading off back to the seaside again we found a park near the structure to take it in at a closer position.

For a structure that is around 500 years old it is in remarkable condition. The only thing we couldn’t find to do was to be able to see down on it from a point where we had parked the car. Even walking back into the town and up a slight rise it wasn’t possible as the aqueduct came to an abrupt end shortly after the house that had been built in the arches started.

Heading back west but with a southerly aspect we took the N380 and it seemed ages before we came across any settlement of note at Alcacovas.

There weren’t as many cork plantations as we had seen on the road inland from Lisbon but there were some and the rest of the land just seemed to be for grazing, except there weren’t any animals to be seen.

There were gates with dirt driveways heading away into the distance along the road we were travelling but the houses that the owners of the land must have built their dwellings far from the road so that you couldn’t see them.

Our minds turned to the Syrian refugee crisis that will be starting to grow with spring and then summer to come and it seems to us that there is a whole lot of spare land in southern Portugal to house the influx of people if they wanted to come here or if the Portuguese people welcomed them.

We switched to the N5 and after emerging back onto what looked like the coastal plain that we had travelled over in the north and central, we turned south through Torroal and Carvalhal.

We did come across a gypsy horse and cart with man, wife and child trotting along the side of the road in the middle of nowhere. Just where they had come from or were going to was any ones guess.

We were now on the N261 which according to our atlas was a scenic road although the only thing scenic was the sun was shining brightly on the skinny pine tree plantation. The soil looks very sandy and probably wouldn’t support anything much than the pine trees that were struggling along. Portugal has a large pulp and paper industry and although we have seen the logging trucks hauling the logs somewhere, we haven’t seen any mills.

We took a short detour out to Cabo de Sines on the coast.

It seemed a strange place as we first came across huge storage facilities and rows and rows of pipes of all sizes that gave the place away as an oil storage.

The town was perched on a cliff top overlooking the harbour which also had a large coal storage facility for the coal fired power station we saw on the way out of town.

It seems a fairly isolated place but the industrial plants would need to have a person work in them so guess it is one of those places that has grown because of the industrialisation that has come to the area over the years.

The scenic road continued as we kept going south and it wasn’t far to our accommodation for the night in Milfontes.

This town is purely for holidaymakers and for a Sunday in mid April it seemed reasonably busy although many of the apartment buildings were still closed up waiting for the holiday season to really commence.

Our apartment is in a quiet location with a balcony that looked out over the pool which surprisingly had a couple of people swimming in it.OK the temperature was reading 20C in the car and the wind was now from the south but it still didn’t seem quite like swimming time yet.

We took a wander to stretch our legs around the path above the beach and then down onto the beach itself.

One of the unsettling features on many of the beaches we have walked on so far in the BBA V3 is the ‘stuff’ that is washed up and left on the beach despite people walking past or even sunbathing on the beach next to the ‘stuff’. Here there was the usual ‘stuff’ but most obvious was a fish cage which actually looked in pretty good condition. Just how it was used in the sea was unclear but we assume it was normally attached to some sort of line on buoys. We should have removed it from the beach but it was too big to carry off and anyway where would we put it?

Back to the apartment and we spent the end of the day relaxing on the terrace and waiting for the sunset.

Tomorrow we head as far south as one can go in Europe!

PS;another one of those obscure songs but where the title fitted nicely.Enjoy Roy Orison on YouTube if you dare.

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