Short blog stories
Feeling the need to indulge in a little far flung fantasising? Flip over to our Flickr account – where we have just posted the last of the Portuguese pretties. It’s irresistible!
Booti-licous!
Meanwhile, a blog on the most romantic place in Portugal is coming soon…..
We are back in Spain again! We are staying in a little casita, or cottage, in the Sierra del Alhama region, with wonderful views of the hills across the valley.
The closest town – Zafarraya – is about a kilometer away and we are about an hour west of Granada and north of Malaga.
From our deck we can watch the sheep trundle through the turnip fields which have been left to rot as their winter feed and the goats on the high hill munching on the trees and bushes. There is almost no noise at all, except the dull clang of the sheep and goat bells, which we discovered sounds eerily similar to the sound of ice clunking in a large G&T. We are now wondering what those goats are really up to in the dark.
Our landlords –Alan and Lynn – live close by, but you would not know it. Only the regular visits from their four dogs give away that we have neighbours at all.
This is just a quick post. A writing job (that pays!) is taking up blog writing time, so there will be a short delay in posting of stories of our final Portuguese adventures and the latest Spanish ones for a little while, so please be patient…. they are on their way. Meanwhile – here’s our room with a view.
Maybe the jokes in this post are a bit close to the bone, maybe you’ll want to bang your head against the wall, but we’re going to do it anyway. So, sing with us ….”the thigh bone’s connected to the hip bone, the hip bone’s connected to some cement and a metre thick wall…tra la la” – hang on, that’s not right, unless of course you are one of the skeletons of the 1245 monks used to build the Capella dos Osso, or Chapel of Bones in Faro. Dem bones, dem bones ain’t doin’ much dancin’ any more, but for nearly two hundred years they’ve been doing a lot of decorating.
Any more bone jokes?
If walls could talk…
The Chapel is an Ossuary – a box, room or other site designed to hold human bones. Often they were built in order to save space, but usually the bones were not on display – which is what makes the Faro chapel bone-tinglingly unusual. There are one or two other examples in the world, including another notable one in Portugal (what is with you Portuguese and the bones?) and a spectacular sounding one in the Czech Republic, complete with bone chandelier! As you approach the entrance to the Faro chapel, it looks like ornate carvings, not skeletal remains!
From a distance it looks like beautiful embossing on the walls
The Faro ossuary is tucked away at the rear of a Baroque church, Igreja do Carmo, through a dusty ante room, a narrow door and across a damp courtyard. It doesn’t really feel much fussed over for such a notable place – there was only a skeleton staff to greet us, but it’s hardly a bone of contention – as who’s going to complain?
Hundreds of empty eyes staring down at you from the ceiling arches
The décor was kindly “donated” by the long-dead monks who were originally buried in a nearby cemetery, before being dug up and “rearranged” in 1816. It is said that the Chapel is designed “as a memory” to remind us of the brevity of life and how we need to live it well – an inscription over one of the doorways (which now looks out over a nursery school – not creepy at all!) warns those entering under their own steam (and skin) “Stop here and think of this fate that will befall you”. It gives you a chill right through to your ….. oh, you know where.
Dem bones, dem bones
Joking aside, we would have loved to have known more about dem bones, dem bones – who was the oldest, what happened to the guy with the hole in his head – although Geoff’s daughter, Eliza, who is currently doing a degree in archaeology and forensic anthropology reliably informs us that it happened post-mortem and not as the result of some dodgy Name of the Rose-style incident.
Ouch!
But there is little information to be had. Perhaps their anonymity is another way to reinforce the brevity of life. Here’s a brief slide show and video to go with that thought! Oh, and a terrible joke to end on:
A skeleton walks into a pub and orders a beer… and a mop.
Tibia continued……
We have been living in the Algarve for a couple of weeks now, so we thought you might like to see where we are and what we are doing.
We are currently house-sitting for relatives of friends of ours, in the central/eastern area of the Algarve – the southern most part of Portugal. John and Prue built this house more than 30 years ago, and at that time, this was all just countryside…
Palms and pools – not such a bad life
The garden of our house
Our house
The courtyard
Our main job is to take care of Dougal – a West Highland Terrier – aged about 4 years old. He’s quite a character.
Dougal
We have discovered that he likes riding in the car and rubbing his nose in the dirt, but mainly he likes sleeping wherever we are sitting!
Walks on the beach
digger Dougal
The garden has fruit trees – oranges and limes – as well as olive and avocado trees. The pond is a magnet for dragonflies, birds and even two turtles, but we found them in an amorous embrace – so didn’t want to stare for too long!
Oranges aren’t the only fruit
We are still waiting for this grapefruit to be ready
Olives abound right outside our bedroom window
Straight from the tree
The elusive blue birds
The dragonflies love the garden pond
Oops – sorry to intrude
Nearby is a great beach alongside a little pine forest – our first taste of the Atlantic ocean on this trip and fabulous long views along the coast.
Geoff and Charlie meet the Atlantic
The water is calm in this sheltered part of Portugal
Taking the long view
There are plenty of local markets most days of the week. At nearby Loule this weekend they got into the Day of the Dead / Halloween vibe in amongst the cheery pots of honey, fiery red piri-piri oil, local fish, veggies and other local goodies.
The Day of the Dead at Loule market
The Saturday market at Loule
Plenty of pots – a Portuguese speciality
Piri piri sauce by the gallon
Old friends, like bookends
Local produce gives heat and colour to the food
Local favourites – salt cod and garlic
A lettuce leaf doesn’t make them better looking
Traditional baskets of beans
The Algarve – originally an Arabic settlement called Al Gharb or “the West” – is a massive tourist destination. It’s population trebles in the summer months. It can be hard to find places that aren’t developed, but there are some that we have found so far – like Ferragudo, a little fishing village and the hillside retreat of Silves.
Ferragudo fishing village
Looking across from little Ferragudo to vast Portimao
Up the hill to Silves
Down the hill from Silves
Next week we plan to visit the west coast of Portugal – where record breaking waves are mastered by the brave and crazy on some of the best surfing beaches in the world, battered by the massive Atlantic winds.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KGaNUA-lpAc
The wind and the sun (by the way, it’s still 24 degrees here!) make up another powerful force – renewable energy. Portugal is a leader in green energy provision. In 2005 the government made a pledge to reduce the country’s dependence on fossil fuels. In the first quarter of 2013, the wind, waves and sunshine produced 70% of Portugal’s energy needs. Nice work, Portugal!
What often happens when religion and architecture come together? You can get the most stunning creations and at the same time, you can also get the worst possible behaviour..
Perhaps the history of two of Southern Spain’s most significant buildings can be summed up with the opening line of Charles Dickens’s novel “Tale of Two Cities” – “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness….” Our two cities are Cordoba and Seville. Both are home to UNESCO World Heritage sites – one celebrates its Arabic origins and trumpets the culture that built such an incredible place and the other, quite literally attempted to bury many of the signs of its Arabic history. Cordoba in the 10th century was the most populous city in the world – between 500,000 to a million souls. The Moors, who had overrun the Christians, who had overrun the Romans (stop me if this is sounding all too familiar in these times!) had developed the city into a centre of learning, culture, economics and politics, with the world’s biggest library, holding up to a million texts. In the city centre had stood the christian Church of St Vincent. The Moors bought half the church from the Christians and proceeded to develop and extend the site into what was to become one of the most important examples of Arabic architecture in the world – the Great Mosque of Cordoba. Centuries later, when the Christian armies over-ran the city they naturally reclaimed the Mosque at the same time. It seems that victory wasn’t, and apparently still isn’t enough. Even as we toured the building all these centuries later, official guides could be heard earnestly telling the tourists that this really is a Christian place – not Muslim at all. The Islamic Council of Spain has even asked the Vatican for permission to jointly worship there and has been repeatedly refused. There were 856 columns in the original mosque, carved from jasper, marble, onyx and granite. Today you can see where newer columns were literally built against them in plain stone to subsume the original.
Contrast this with the inscriptions above the entrance archway of the Reales Alcazar, or Royal Palace, in Seville. While one announces in Spanish that the building’s creator was ‘the very high, noble and conquering Don Pedro, by the grace of God king of Castila and León,’ another proclaims repeatedly in Arabic that ‘there is no conqueror but Allah.’ Now the oldest royal palace still in use, it was originally built as a Moorish fort in 913. It too has been extended and altered over the centuries by a myriad of Christian kings and noblemen, but its Muslim heritage is preserved and celebrated. Both have done a fine job in creating one of the most beautiful places we have ever seen. And it is dripping in history. From the Maiden’s Courtyard, through to the The Admiral’s Hall was where Ferdinand Magellan, Amerigo Vespucci and Juan Sebastian Elcano planned their world trips and cartographer Juan de la Cosa crafted the first world map. Down the hallway was the site of Columbus’s meeting with the king and queen having returned from the “newly discovered” lands – depicted in paintings that still hang on the ancient walls. It is a celebration of all history, not a distortion of its parts and that makes it all the more beautiful.
We have been travelling for three months now and have seen many and varied things – old, new, weird and wonderful – and all of it has been great fun. After leaving Mallorca, the next leg on our journey of discovery took us through some of the ancient cities of southern Spain – Valencia, Cordoba and Seville. This is the first of three short blogs we’ll be posting in the coming days about our visits to each of them. Their histories are fascinating, although they all have a recurring theme of being great Moorish cities and districts; centres of learning, excellence, art and culture… until various christian kings of Spain came along and literally in some case, wrecked it all. We took the ferry from Mallorca to Valencia. It was a bright and sunny 250km sail that we were able to part-share with Geoff’s sister 17,000km away in Australia, thanks to the wonders of wifi and Skype!
Melbourne, Melbourne, this is Mallorca calling
Valencia is the largest commercial port in the Med, and the third largest city in Spain.
Valencia harbour
It is also credited as the birthplace of paella.
The home of paella
Steeped in history, Valencia’s Roman name of “Valentia” means “strength” or “valour” and has one of the largest “historical districts” of any Spanish town. Maybe we are getting spoiled or complacent about happenings in centuries past, but we decided to spend the bulk of our one day in Valencia exploring the modern, not the ancient. But we aren’t just being contrary. If you do a Google Images search on Valencia it is the more recent spectacular architecture which dominates the results – the Ciutat de les Arts i les Ciències or City of Arts and Sciences. The complex of modern architecture, spaces, bridges and gardens ribbons its way along the dry riverbed of the city’s Turia River and includes the science museum, landscaped walkways, an opera house, a planetarium and the oceanographic park. We spent a lot of our time in the shark house, watched as Foucault’s Pendulum progressed through space and admired our own internal workings in the Science Museum, so we really did go back to ancient times after all – as much as 400 million years back to be precise! Enjoy our modern take on an old master:
