Saturday, February 06, 2010

A bit more about the Portuguese outback...

We are in the Beira Interior Sul region of Portugal not far from the Spanish border and its verry verrrry quiet. You can carry on a conversation quite easily with someone a hundred yards away and hear the neighbouring farmer's wife shouting at her flock of goats and sheep very clearly.
Sadly you don't see many children in the village, the younger families have gone to the cities like Lisbon or have gone to work in France.

Here's a couple of shots from a walk I took up in the hills behind Janet and Clive's quinta, lots of rocks, boulders and scrubby vegetation with a random olival scattered here and there.

I love the way we humans have made very little impact on the landscape around here - in the picture above you can just see the nearest village tucked away to the right. None of the houses are over two floors high and rather than gardens they tend to have little micro-holdings of olives, vines and vegetables.
Here's my walking chum Harry coming down the road at top speed...

...and here's Clive after a haircut in Fundao at a barbers shop straight out of the Fifties - good haircut though!

No comments: