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I spent the winter of 2004/5 mainly in Portugal, but initially in Spain. I wouldn’t bother with Spain again – I’d go straight to Portugal, as you plan to do. I loved it. I only toured the southern, Algarve part, but it was absolutely delightful. Wonderful, friendly and ‘nice’ people, beautiful countryside, and lots of places to stop, away from habitation (and away from other motorhomes too!).
It depends what you are looking for, of course, but I recommend you do it, certainly the Algarve, where winter temperatures and sunshine are akin to our Spring/Summer temps!
Good luck.
Barry
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Dear Barry,
Yes, I remember you going to Portugal last winter . Which months were you there ? Our diary is flexible now that my mother-in-law has passed, but we really need to take the break to relieve the winter months here in the North of Scotland . Initially we had thought of December, but internet searches suggest that could be cold and rainy in Portugal.
Did you stay on one site or move around all of the time ? If it feels like springtime here, that sounds perfect-with the odd warm day to keep us going.
What driving/camping precautions do you suggest ?
We are considering driving South (about 700 miles !!) to Plymouth (?) and taking the ferry to Santander, exploring the part of northern Spain around Santellina del mar where we visited with our children several years ago and then travelling South into Portugal. I really want to see the Cork and horse chestnut growing areas and of course the area where wines and fortified wines are produced . Lisborn sounds tempting – depending on the traveling restrictions and camp sites.
Having got the bug, I wonder, are there any other Exsis owner out there thinking of the same trip ? Could we poole our resources ?
Tom and Phyllida
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We went in the beginning of January and returned beginning/mid April I believe.
We wildcamped the entire time, often making use of the parking at many if the barragems (dams) but they can get crowded with other m/homes and we didn’t like that – some were better than others. We liked Lagos area and mooched around there for many weeks – beautiful. The police are very tolerant, except with stupid people who treat the street like a campsite, hanging washing out, deckchairs, that sort of thing. Be discreet, don’t stay more than about 24 hours and there is no problem. Of course, there are many camp sites open if you prefer but I have no knowledge of them.
We took no different precautions than we do anywhere else. The Portuguese are lovely people and we had no problems whatsoever. I’m sure you won’t either.
Good luck!
Barry
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Hi all
Forgive the loonnggg post…
We were in Portugal for most of March this year, travelling from South (we crossed from Seville in Spain) to North (heading towards Santiago) as part of our Big Year Out and LOVED it. The weather was stunning, pretty much the whole time, and I think had been all winter – I don’t think this can be relied on every year, but this year it was blue skies and late teens / early twenties temperatures every day.
And TRAMS! (a few years ago we founded ‘the wee tram’, a guided tour of Belfast’s Titanic shipyard on board a replica tram – in the process becoming vintage tram nerds – so Portugal was definitely on our to-do list!)
Like Spain, we found Portugal quite busy for motorhomers in the Winter – they can rely on a steady trade of ‘snowbirds’ (mostly Brits and Germans, we found) making their way South for Winter and so plenty of sites stay open. There’s also a pretty well-developed aires network in Portugal. We especially loved the ‘Turistcenter’ campsite near Lagos and the campsite in Zambujeira Del Mar – and highly recommend the aires at Sagres, Mafra (free & with electric hook-up!), Obidos and Tavira. For Lisbon, we stayed (along with a handful of other vans every night, it seems to be encouraged) in the vast car park of the ferry terminal at Seixal, so we could just tumble out of the van and on to the ferry every morning, 10 minutes crossing to the heart of Lisbon!
And now here’s the long bit: I’m going to paste the ‘Portugal’ section of one of the travel emails we sent home from our Big Trip. I’m working on turning these emails into some sort of travel blog of our whole trip, with pics. This is the sneak preview!
So, Portugal! Now I know I’ve been raving about Spain until you wanted to throw a bucket of cold water over me and tell me to calm down. But the thing is, I think we liked Portugal even more – they’re similar in a lot of ways, but we reckoned Portugal just has the edge. It’s a bit greener, a bit scruffier, a bit more laid-back, a bit cheaper – and it has a proper coast with a proper ocean: we’d had some lovely times on the Costas on the east coast of Spain, looking out at the meek and mild little lapping waves of the Med, but as soon as we reached Sagres on the west coast of Portugal and saw vast breakers crashing in from the savage Atlantic, something in our Celtic souls clicked back into place.
Portugal was where we really started to master the slowing-down thing I mentioned at the start. We weighed anchor for a few days on a luxury (but el-cheapo off-season) campsite near Lagos with a swimming pool and power showers and washing & drying machines the size of the Large Hadron Collider (yes, sad as it may seem, these are the things to truly warm the cockles of the heart of the long-term traveller), and for a few days more at a tiny resort called Zambujeira del Mar. The pleasures here were many and manifold: as well as the entertainment value of saying its name in a Jamaican accent, Zambujeira (mon!) smelt amazing (we camped surrounded by pine and eucalyptus trees and fresh-blooming mimosa) and boasted heart-stopping cliff-top walks above more of those cataclysmic Atlantic breakers.
Next stop Lisbon, and the excited child in me had been looking forward to Lisbon since the start of the trip. Trams trams trams trams trams! Finally we were going to ride on a proper honest-to-goodness tram that wasn’t a museum piece in a heritage park, wasn’t a swoopy smooshy grey boring new one, and wasn’t (ahem) an affectionate ‘wee’ approximation of the genuine article. Lisbon (and, we were later to discover, Porto) just kept using their old tram system long after other cities had ripped up their tram lines and switched to smelly buses in the name of progress. At various times over the last few decades, this probably made them look hilariously old-fashioned and quaint: but now, as anyone with any taste knows, trams are cool – it was incredible to see those venerable old tramcars crammed with people, ding-donging merrily through the switchback streets within millimetres of parked cars’ door mirrors. The locals still use them as quick, regular, handy city-centre transport (we even saw a few people hitch a cheeky ride by jumping on the back, just like in the old shipyard photos) but I think most of us on board were fellow tourists, grabbing on to the leather straps as the tram wove and wobbled its way over the hills, relishing the ride with an expression that said: trams trams trams trams trams!
Now I wouldn’t want you to think that poor Susan had to endure countless tram trips and even a tram museum in Lisbon. Or maybe I should say, I wouldn’t want you to think that poor Susan had to endure nothing but countless tram trips and even a tram museum in Lisbon. We did some other cool stuff too! (the tram took us there.)
We visited Belem to stand in the shadow of the mighty Explorers Monument and to try our favourite Portuguese tasty treat (pastel de nata – little custard tarts mmmmmmm) in Pastels De Belem (where they were invented).
One night we went out for dinner and realised we had stumbled across a proper local Fado bar. Fado is the passionate, melancholic traditional folk music of Portugal which rose up from the slums of Lisbon. We first encountered it in a little town called Tavira when we had just crossed the border, drawn in pied-piper-style by the music echoing along a little side street to a lovingly-curated Fado museum where the musicians were just about to give a demonstration. The musicianship was incredible: one classical guitar, one impossibly-complex 12-string guitar playing counterpoint, and one voice – oh, that voice! – such emotion, lament and loss and strength and spirit.
So in Tavira we had heard Fado as an art-form, accomplished and technically exquisite. In Lisbon, we experienced Fado as a tipsy bar-room hooley: crammed into a tiny, hot, sticky-floored attic room, the singers (this time there were three: one man, one fearsomely-intimidating lady, and one other guy who we initially took to be a tramp who had wandered in off the street, but who suddenly burst into song with an incredible, yearning singing voice) moved amongst the audience, squeezing between the jam-packed chairs and teaching us all to join in with the choruses and responses. Susan and I were even ordered up to dance for the final up-tempo number. (The lady singer brooked no disobedience.). It was sweaty, spirited, funny, friendly, a bit rough-around-the-edges – a little peek into the soul of the city.
Another day we had brunch on the top deck of a double-decker bus on top of a shipping container, as you do. ‘Village Underground’ was one of those unbearably-cool hipster urban pop-up places, built from shipping containers, old buses, and copious quantities of beard oil for all those lovingly-cultivated bushy beards. Even though we weren’t cool enough to be there by a factor of about a thousand million, they served us up the most amazing brunch, all arriving in courses like a gourmet banquet: granola and yoghurt, bagels and pancakes, fresh fruit, oven-baked eggs, bacon and goats cheese… amazing! Afterwards we went shopping in LX Factory, another repurposed industrial space filled with pour-over coffee emporiums and flip-flop boutiques. And how did we stumble upon these hidden treasures, I hear you ask? Well, it just so happens that they were right beside the tram museum. You see! It’s all thanks to the tram.
Winding our way northwards, clinging to the coast, Portugal just kept getting better and better. Mafra was a tiny wee town utterly dwarfed, as of a rowing-boat in the shadow of the Titanic, by a monumental baroque palace containing a library so vast that there’s a colony of bats living there.
Óbidos, a whitewashed, battlement-encircled hill village, introduced us to ginja, a potent cherry liqueur served in a little chocolate cup – when you’ve necked the shot of liqueur, you eat the cup. The shopping streets were packed with ginja stalls charging €1 a pop – and, well, it would have been rude to walk past any of them at that price.
We also discovered ‘Book and Cook’, a hotel/restaurant where the tottering walls were crammed with 65,000 books and every menu item was named after an author. It was like we had accidentally stumbled into Susan’s subconscious and were eating dinner in the living embodiment of her dreams.
Nazaré, another oops-we-appear-to-have-accidentally-stayed-here-for-five-days-how-did-that-happen, is Portugal’s surfing capital and consequently all the cafes and restaurants are big on seafood. Looking for lunch one day – really, just wanting a sandwich or a panini or something – we couldn’t find anywhere that wasn’t serving ginormous platters of swordfish or lobster or sea urchins. Finally we plumped for a cafe advertising tapas – you cant go wrong with tapas – and asked the friendly waiter to help us with translations of the tapas menu. “Ah! ok, that one is chicken gizzards – that one is raw mince – that one is little fish with their glassy dead eyes still looking at you -” (I may be paraphrasing here) “- and that one is octopus, our speciality.” So, first-ever experience of octopus it was! Quite tasty actually.
Incidentally, once we told the waiter where we’re from, he broke with all tradition and had actually been to Belfast – in fact, he had even lived there for 6 months. (Pretty much 100% of the rest of the time, people either say “oh yes, I’ve been to Dublin/Galway/Cork/Kerry” or “d’you know, I’ve never been to Ireland, but I’ve always wanted to go…”). Words can’t describe how surreal it was to hear an extremely Portuguese bloke saying the words “Connswater shopping centre” and (his favourite phrase from his time in NI) “aye, dead on”.
Onwards to Coimbra, pretty much a perfect little city: lovely riverside walks past a cool multicoloured fountain, cobbled olde-worlde town centre, steep medieval streets packed with cosy bars and coffee stops, and – unexpectedly perched at the top of it all – a venerable university with libraries and clock towers and views out over the city from the balconies.
And then to Porto, in lots of ways like a slightly scaled-down Lisbon (including, as already mentioned, more trams trams trams trams trams! I know I speak for both of us when I say that the appeal of a tram ride was in no way whatsoever getting old.)
Porto was also home to temporary exhibitions on two of our favourite artists: MC Escher (all those engravings of impossible architecture, staircases where the bottom meets the top, that kind of thing) and Banksy (who became even more famous a few months ago by partially shredding one of his pictures and thereby adding further millions to its value). So, having started our Iberian chapter with Dali, Picasso and Gaudi, it was coming to a close with Escher and Banksy.
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