Cascais and beyond

A quick drive along the coast to Cascais and the beautiful Casa das Historias, a museum devoted to the amazing artist Paula Rego. Throughout her life, she suffered through bouts of anxiety and depression and her work can verge on the disturbing. Etchings of fairy tales from a childhood spent in England bring out the very darkest parts of the stories. Her portraits are full of strong, physical women staring at the viewer. A quote from an early teacher of hers instructing her to “paint what’s in your head” seems to have freed her to explore the depths. 

We drove on to Cabo da Roca, Europe’s westernmost point and took a quick hike through a blanket of succulent plants, sour figs, their yellow and pale pink blooms little pops of colour in the spiky mass. The edge of the path is littered with white rose petals —their perfume still wafting in the sea air. The scrabbly path led down to a small beach framed by massive towering rocks. The waves crashed, fellow walkers tanned in the 20° sun, a pair of young women posed endlessly for each other with the sea as backdrop. What a feeling to stand here, feet pointing at the Atlantic knowing that the next land west of here is home.

We headed inland toward the Parque Natural da Estrela for a little countryside. Cherry trees coming into bloom, sheep and goats in the fields, lots of stone buildings left to ruin. I imagine the cost of maintaining and/or renovating them must be prohibitive. I had seen a little remote hotel while we were researching the trip called the Cherry Sculpture Hotel. Kitsch meets kirsch. In honour of the ginjinha (sour cherry liqueur) we enjoyed in Lisbon, it seemed like the right thing to do. Some lovely design tempered by the incredibly gaudy — freestanding room pods shaped like cherries — complete with massive stems pointing skyward. The pool is also, you guessed it, a bunch of cherries. The bed in our room —  a cherry. What must the locals think of this wacky place tucked into their remote village. We had almost no company in the dining room, cheesy music playing in the background.

Roads lined with eucalyptus, silvery olive trees, orange, lemon and grapefruit trees all heavy with fruit. The fields separated by low stone walls topped with wires waiting to train the pared-back grape vines planted below. The towns are all fanned out on hillside terraces. Tall retaining walls of sand-coloured rock separate streets as the villages climb above us. The mountainsides are crisscrossed with tracks.  So many trees are black. 333,000 acres decimated by forest fires in 2019 and again last fall. A third of the fires were started by arsons. Police claimed the culprits were doing it for financial gain — aiming to buy the burnt wood afterward or looking to pick up the land for bargain prices after the fact.

We pull into a village at the base of a mountain and park the car. After a couple of scares, thinking we are doing something very wrong, we discover that delivery truck drivers in rural Portugal don’t use doorbells, they just sit on their horns. 

We wander through someone’s backyard, misunderstanding the symbol that means “This is NOT the path” but find it soon enough. The trail is up and up and up. Way harder than anticipated. Turns out the European moderate trail is the Canadian difficult. Noted. We climbed for two and a half hours. No switchbacks. Just up, through old oak and beech forest with signs of boars everywhere, little upturned patches of dirt along the track. Empty beech nut husks and acorn caps scattered in the leaf litter. The path is built and lined with huge, mossy rocks. It feels ancient. No doubt built in a time before people got jobs, when the scrabble to survive on one’s little plot of land meant long winters filling time doing projects to make summer farming easier. The top of the mountain is like a moonscape, granite rocks, strewn hither and yon. We scramble down the other side, a steep meandering track through loose rock. The kind of trail that makes you pitch forward so much you’re sure a slip will send you tumbling into the abyss. We pull out our sandwiches at the Poço do Inferno, a pretty alcove cut into the wall of rock, a waterfall that makes everything around it cool and damp and green. 

The rest of the hike is a leisurely walk along a logging road curling around the backside of the mountain. I almost put my foot down on what I think is a snakeskin and take a closer look. It isn’t a snake but a long line of processionary caterpillars. Designed to fool predators into thinking they are one large insect as opposed to a hundred small ones, they travel like this, in safety, nose to tail, following a trail of pheromones on the hunt for a new source of food. It is said that if you make the first one go in a circle they will all follow and spiral for eternity. We make a quick stop at the grocery store (closed from 2-3. I guess lunch is later here). Olive-flavoured ruffle chips are hands-down my new favourite snack.

We opt for smaller roads to take us back to the coast. Switchbacks through rolling mountainsides. It feels like the moors of Northumberland. Desolate, rocky. The finest coating of topsoil on the tan bedrock. There is nothing here save the occasional, abandoned farmhouse. Steep drops beyond the guardrails to the right of the road. Signs indicating that it is single track for 5 km. Luckily we only cross one car’s path and it is an old Portuguese guy who blasts past us completely unfazed by how tight the squeeze is. We drive through tiny hamlets. Not unlike Quebec villages, the houses are very modest, the town budget having been blown on the church. Everything is stone. Walls, homes, churches, roads, We are blindly following Google maps, bumping our way down narrow cobbled roads through towns of twenty homes. The villagers peer through the windshield at us. Before I moved to the country, I would’ve thought they were giving us the evil eye, now I know they’re just wondering which of their neighbours got a new car.

On to Costa Nova, a deserted seaside resort. Beach clubs — front doors blocked by puddles of sand, piles of stacked chairs and striped chaises longues, little palapas stand in sand drifts. There is no one here. The long wide beach is totally empty. We stroll on the wooden boardwalk, past a little church tucked behind the dunes, past the buildings painted in colourful stripes, past the stores selling tacky tourist trinkets. Is there anything sadder than a beach resort in the winter?