1st May

Another festival! This time for May Day (Labour Day in Portugal). Complete with BBQ'ed sardines and folky type music. The Portuguese have May Day on the 1st May unlike us Brits who have the holiday on the nearest Monday so we decided Colin could have a day off boat jobs on the British May day too ;-)



5th May
On Mondays and Friday it's possible to take a 50 minute bus from Alcoutim to the historic town of Mertola, further up the Rio Guadiana, giving 4 hours to visit. It was already pretty hot when we boarded the bus at 10 in the morning, trying to sit on the shady side although the road was so wiggly sometimes we had shade, others baking sun.

The bus left the river and headed north up to the high plains where the landscape was sparsly populated. The grassy areas had been parched by the sun to a pale yellow colour and what green there was came from terraces of small fir trees in the rocky ground. Occasionally there would be a cluster of white painted houses where people got on and off the bus, a few herds of white cows but otherwise not a lot of life could be seen. The same landscape stretched to the horizon, rolling hills turned brown by the sun.

We crossed a river gorge into the Alentejo, more empty plains and then the castle tower of Mertola appeared in the distance perched on its rocky outcrop between the Guadiana and Oeiras rivers.

Trading ships once were able to get this far upriver and the town was a defensive and trading post for many settlers from pre-Roman to the Romans, then the Moors who brought an Islamic style to the town and finally to the Christian reconquest in the 1200s soon after which the river lost its importance and the town went into decline.

After coffee and cake in the little market we had a wander around the cobbled streets of the old, walled town and up to the castle. Here were some excavations of Roman settlements below the castle walls. The history has been well preserved with 10 museum centres to visit. Unfortunately it seemed everything was closed on Mondays so all we could do was peer through the fences and gates. Well it was a nice day anyway to slowly amble around the streets and by the time we'd had lunch it was time to get the return bus.



7th May
We're still anchored up the river Guadiana enjoying the countryside, although it has been a bit baking hot the last couple of days with light winds. Colin has got all the arch and associated jobs finished and I've been making some covers to protect the boat from sun and bugs. We're about ready to move on now but the wind forecast for the Straights of Gibraltar has mostly easterly winds, some days gusting up to F9, with just an odd day of westerly winds. We need 4 days of west or north to get us through into the Med. We don't want to wait the weather out in a marina due to the costs so we'll hang out up here for a few more days and see how the weather forecasts develop. Perhaps we will be spending the summer here if those easterlies don't go away!