Castro Marim to Alcoutim

I am writing a travel guide for motorhomes that covers Portugal . Nice work if you can get it, you might think, and you would be right. It does require work but this “work” is enjoyable, as this article should show. At the current stage of the guide, I needed to take some more pictures and do more research on a few sites I have already visited. Part of this research trip took me down a lovely stretch of Portugal , not well trodden by tourists, from Castro Marim in the South East, to Alcoutim, inland, up the Guardiana River .

You don't have to go far from the highly developed tourist areas of the Algarve to experience a totally different Portugal . Conveniently situated just over the border from Spain is the small town of Castro Marim . I took the scenic route, more or less following the Guadiana River, to another fortress town, Alcoutim.

oooO0Oooo

I set off at around 9:30AM . At first the road from Castro Marim was a fast one. The N122 is not without big ups and downs but it is well made. Even from this main road, I started to feel deep in the countryside within minutes. There was a morning mist on the hills that partially hid the bright green, stumpy trees that covered them. The ups and downs on the road meant that, every now and then, vistas would appear of layers and layers of hills stretching to the horizon with flashes of silver from the river. The N122 took me a few hundred kilometres and then it was time to turn off onto real country roads that lead to the small village of Foz De Odeleite .

While driving down this smaller road I found myself congratulating myself for not being a driver coming in the opposite direction, as all the steepest slopes seemed to be downward for me. I was hoping that the rest of the road to Alcoutim would closely follow the river (this was what I took the map to indicate) and so my ups and downs would be limited from here on in.

oooO0Oooo

Once at Foz De Odeleite my free camping antenna started to vibrate. No, I must be strong. I already have enough sites in the guide and now it is time to consolidate and get to the next step. I must not keep adding sites as I go along. Alas, I broke down at the sheer appropriateness of the site and decided it had to go in the guide. The site I saw is right next to the river, where boats normally embark. There were already two motorhomes there. I got talking to a Dutch couple in one of the vans. Our talk did not commence well. I made the gaff of starting the conversation with good morning in German (a bit like calling a Scot, English). Still, they were forgiving and I soon got valuable information about where water can be found and which sources are drinkable.

Having decided to include the site in the guide, I needed to collect information about amenities, get photos and a GPS fix. I put the dog on his lead and set off into the small hillside village of Foz De Odeleite , a few meters from the parking site. A brief walk around the village soon told me that I was in “The Rest of Portugal”, as I like to call the area outside the highly developed Algarve and the big cities. Every human I met (all five of them) said good morning to me. When it was me who greeted them first there was no surprise on their part. Even the man busy burning wood in his field, well out of hearing distance, returned my wave with an energetic gesture. Naturally, we were two human beings in sight of each other and we were saying hello. This is one of life's simple pleasures to me.

As for researching amenities, I found that there was a Shell Gas refilling shop, and many communal, non-drinking water taps. I continued my search for the drinking water source that the Dutch man had told me about. Eventually I came to a small white building with a large handle on the side and two taps. Evidently, you pump the handle to make water flow from the taps.

Soon after finding the drinking water tap, I got some of the story of the village from a lady I met at one of the other communal taps. There were no cafés, restaurants or mini markets (mini supermarkets common in rural Portugal ) in the village. There had been cafés but they had all closed down through lack of business. I asked if many tourists came here. “Oh yes”, she said, “loads of tourists, almost every day.” She told me that a large construction project on the edge of the village was the work of a property speculator in Lisbon , who hoped to sell the houses to foreigners. “They even have a swimming pool!” she exclaimed. In a village where they pump drinking water by hand from a communal well, a swimming pool was a funny idea. We stood for a moment and smiled at the irony of such luxury amid such basic living conditions. “I am writing a travel guide for motorhomes”, I explained. “Would you like more tourists to come here?” “Yes, of course. We need the money”, she said. I thanked her and said goodbye. Her dog and mine had been making friends. I separated them and we went our way.

I continued down the road from Foz de Odeleite to Alcoutim, on the small local road that follows the river. The sun was shining as I drove through small, riverside villages and past colourful yachts moored out in the river. It had rained recently and the hills leading away from the water on either side were a lush green. Just as I was leaving the largest of the waterside settlements, Guerreiros Do Rio, I came across a shepherd grazing his sheep on one of the rare, flat areas on the banks of the river. There were many new lambs in the flock. Some stayed close to the adult sheep but others played in groups. Before you could say “cute as a lamb”, I was parked and out of the motorhome, taking pictures. My dog protested that he had to stay inside. This time he had no chance as I wanted close-ups of even the most timid lambs and, without his “help”, was able to get them. A Greek and German couple also stopped to take pictures and we talked for a while. We remarked on how the most striking thing about the scene was not the picture but the sound. The bleating of the lambs and deeper “baa” ing of the sheep mixed in with the hundreds of bells around their necks and the occasional calls and whistles of the shepherd.

I made one more stop on the way to Alcoutim, just before I got to the town there was a view of both Alcoutim and it's Spanish neighbour, Sanlúcar, across the river. If I were to name one reason for going to Alcoutim, it would be the view of Sanlúcar from the waterfront of Alcoutim. To me, the buildings of both places have a simple elegance about them that has been well preserved, despite many new building projects. Add to this the rolling green hills that stretch away from the water and the river itself, with its graceful yachts and you have quite a picture. The hills that I am talking about are quite steep so you get the feeling that you are in a place that is hidden from the rest of the world. Indeed, because of the hills, both places are inaccessible from many directions, with the river route that I took being an exception.

oooO0Oooo

Alcoutim is a destination for river tours from Vila Real (on the estuary of the Guadiana River ) and bus tours. This means that for a few hours once a day, in tourist season, the normally quiet streets of the small town are packed with well dressed, camera toting people, trying to soak up the essence of town in the short time before their tour continues. The local businesses are well used to them and happy to have the trade. What surprised me is that the prices, while perhaps a little high for local Portuguese, still seemed very reasonable to me. I had a lunch of Feijoada (a dish of beans with meat) at the largest restaurant in the main town square for only €6 including bread and olives. The dish came with an egg cooked in the stew and was just the kind of hearty sustenance I was looking for on that cold and rainy day.

The patron of the restaurant was outside, tending to his barbeque that was barely sheltered from the pouring rain by the overhang of his roof. When he was not busy, we talked about the tourist business and the guide I was writing. Many people in that area have small pieces of land that they want to sell to eager foreign tourists and another local who entered the conversation suggested I convert his riverside property into a motorhome park. The proprietor told me that the town struggled to accommodate all the tourists who came in the summer and needed more hotel rooms, even though those hotel rooms would only be used for a few months of the year. I mentioned that a great advantage of motorhome tourists is that they bring their beds with them.

The rain cleared that night. The near full moon came out and I took my camera down to the water's edge to take some pictures of Sanlúcar by night. Tomorrow I would be travelling North, leaving the Algarve and crossing into the far less developed and rural Alentejo region. Another minor road, snaking through green hills and small towns, but then, like these roads, my motorhome was not built for speed.

oooO0Oooo

Go back to Tales from the Road