Monday 2 November 2015

Monday 26th October 2015 – Foia, Portugal

We headed west along the coast and then north and inland. Our first stop was Caldas de Monchique, a small spa resort set in the foothills of the Algarve’s highest mountain, famous for its curative waters, supposedly good for rheumatism. It is only a small village but has a few spa hotels and a massive bottling factory (well hidden in the valley) that supplies the whole of Portugal. We had a pleasant stroll down the valley, past the bottling plant to a small watermill and then took a look around the village. The old casino is now used to house arts and crafts exhibitions and we were impressed with the quality and originality of much of the work.
Leaving the village was a little difficult as the one-way system took us past the bottling plant with lorries queued up on both sides of the road. The gap was too small for us to fit through but I managed to find an English-speaking lorry driver at the factory and it turned out that it was his lorry that was blocking us. With many apologies, he moved his lorry as best he could and we scraped by (not literally) with inches to spare.
On then, through Monchique to Foia and the aire set at the summit of the mountain (902m), surrounded by television, radio and mobile telephone masts plus an observatory. Despite that there was still room to see the wonderful views and we walked a circuit to admire them. It was quite murky in the distance but we were still able to see the whole southern coast of the Algarve as well as the Atlantic coast far to the north. Inland, the views were still extensive with the landscape was covered in low hills.
We settled down for a night on the bare mountain (except for the aerials) and the clouds settled down with us, obscuring all of the views.

Photos: The gardens of the Caldas de Monchique spa; The bread oven (actually two ovens) near the main square – it was still warm when we visited in the afternoon and had obviously been used to bake bread that morning; The main square of Caldas de Monchique with the old casino in the centre of the picture; The view from Foia with the dark clouds descending – it has become a fashion for visitors to build small cairns.



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