The excesses of last night came back and bit me this morning. Feeling sick, I found it very difficult to eat any breakfast,and even Paul felt ill, so between us, in spite of our early start and our good intentions, we delayed setting off for a good couple of hours.
We’d been woken before the alarm by a man with a strimmer cutting the grass outside our window, which was not a good way to start the day. At least it got us up, though.

Three hours later, we were iin the car heading west towards Albufera, and rode the new road to the end. One day it will be extended to the north, at which point junction 1, where we came off, will be somewhere half way along its length and all manner of confusion will ensue. For the moment, though, it brought us out a few dozen kiometres from te ver urthest edge of Europe; the most south-westerly point on the continental mainland.

The rest of the journey would not be nearly so easy. The roads from there on are small and winding, with unmade edges, and just enough room to swerve when another car comes on in your direction.

We cruised through the baren countryside, with only dustybrown scrub and the occasional weak-looking shrub to look at, past the sun-bleached zoo and eventually out onto the old coast road.

Towns were few and far between out here, so we stopped off at Vila do Bispo. This tiny town is the administrative centre of the whole area, yet its main attraction seems to be the grotty public toilets in the middle of its straggly central square. We used them, then ate ice cream to cool down and looked in the small neat church by the main road, but could find little else to do there. It was a town of panting dogs, too heat-weary to bark you away, and of women in mourning black sitting in the shae on pavements, calling up and down the street to one another because it wa too much effort to move closer and talk at a sensible volume.

It was hot.

We returned to the car, and continued our journey through the dusty nothingness, glad of the air conditioning that kept us cool. By the sides of the road, triangular signs warned us presence of wind socks, but those that we saw had been torn to shreds by the Atlantic gale, and so posed no risk to anyone.

It didn’t tae long to get from there to Sagres, the second-to-last town in Europe. It is dominated by a wide fortress wall that cuts off the spit beyond it. Nobody thought to build the rest of the castle as the sheer drop sixty or seventy feet into the sea beyond it ensured that no invading army would every attack from any direction but the front. The guidebook said not, to bother going in and, after peering through an opening we cncurred, and left Sagres, essentially just a huge car park, for Cape St Vincent (Cabo de Sao Vicente), the very last place in Europe, named after the patron saint of Lisbon. Apparently his body was washed up here after he was killed by the Romans and, although it was destroyed in the 12th century, there used to be a shrine to him here.

You’d never now its religious history now. We parked in the third-to-last parking space in Europe, among the tour coaches, and all the other cars and totally unnecessary off-roaders, and were surprised to find a large market selling cheap jewellery scorpions mounted inside glass cases, and semi-precious rocks. At least half of the stalls, though, were selling woollen hats, and thick-knit jumpers that would have been enough to give you heat stroke in Iceland, never mind on the Algarve.

The place was crawling with sight-seers, so after joining them in an extended picture-taking session, we returned to the car and retraced our steps towards Lagos.

Honestly, tourists can really spoil a place.

Lagos is an interesting town. It is full of bars and restaurants, and has a statue of Portugal’s 14-year-old boy king, who looks more like a young girl in a space suit.

Less interested in that than sitting around watching the world go by, though, we found a bar with a roof-top terrace, and it became immediately obvious that the effects of last night’s excesses hadn’t quite worn off.

This entry was posted on Friday, August 13th, 2004 at 11:43 am and is filed under Journal. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.