East to West

We are trying to experience as many different areas of Portugal as possible during our stay here.  Having spent a great 10 days at "Gary's", adjacent to the Spanish border, we headed west and up a bit on a B road thorugh the inland hills and across to the west coast.  We had identified an area we thought would be a good stopping place for Tony and Claire (colleagues from St. Andrews days-actually Julie's boss!) to come to stay for a week.  It is 30 or so kms from Porto yet still south enough to visit the Coimbra region.

The camp site was on a spit of land separated from the mainland by a 'Ria', a lagoon.  This spit of land is a couple of kms wide and all of 20 kms long.  We were at the very end of it, near the small town of Sao Jacinto, which made it extremely peaceful.

The Ria provides the local people with fish, a special seaweed for fertilizer, and salt.  These are the main industries in the area (which by UK standards is fairly poor).  As the tide goes out each day we watched fishermen in special boats lay their nets to catch mostly squid, and on the opposite bank gather in the seaweed.  At the mouth of the Ria as it joins the Atlantic there is a huge salt extraction works.

This all sounds very industrial but actually it was quite serene and a different and more simplistic way of life than we are used to.