Travel

Saturday, the 18th of November 2023. Fancy an ocean with a mountain view in the south of Portugal in early December, in the Monchique mountains, with the Atlantic stretching out at your feet? Starting Friday 1 December (public holiday) and Saturday 2 December through Sunday 3 December, the Monchique mountains are hosting their annual hiking festival. The town hall of this small mountain village is putting on over a dozen different hikes, well worth your while taking the train and bus to make an extended weekend out of it. Getting off the train at Portimão station, you take Line 94 …

Saturday, the 17th of December 2022 Now, the other day I was reading in ECO123 that the town of Monchique was threatened with extinction. And the same magazine carried an online job advert. What can I say? I’ll blame coincidence for the fact that I left Leipzig, unable to resist my curiosity, and started on my way to Monchique, nestling in the mountains of the same name. I wanted that job. And here is my story.   Travelling is supposed to be fun; it should be safe, as fast as possible and cheap too of course. Now for years we …

19 km. I’ve now arrived in the heart of the Algarve. To be journeying on foot also means to gain direct contact with the people and their environment. And isn’t that what we journalists need and want to know? What makes the people of this country tick? What are they thinking, and: how are they? In Alte, right at the beginning of the fifth day of my hike I meet an elderly lady collecting a little brushwood at the empty and dried-out Ribeira de Alte, a brook which used to be home to fish and many other wildlife, a biotope …

  I order my breakfast from next door. The price is 2 euros and forty cents and it’s eight o’clock when I hand over the key at reception and walk across to Senhor Jorge. One hot milky coffee and a cheese roll please. Bom dia. Two minutes later everything is standing on the counter and I take my breakfast outside onto the terrace. Messines has already woken up and I am studying the way ahead on the map. Aiming for the Vale Vinagre I am soon starting my small ascent. First of all out of town and through the underpass …

São Bartolomeu de Messines is the town associated with the writer, educator and legal expert João de Deus Ramos, who was born here in 1830 and went on to gain nation-wide fame at the time with his educational programme for children and adults. He studied law in Coimbra and died in 1896 in Lisbon. This is what I read when I reach the Casa do Povo, the House of the People. Carved in stone. I might be wrong but I’m under the impression that Messines wants to be more than just one of seven communities forming part of the former …

Waking up, I turn on the light and find myself in a 45-euro room in a guesthouse that will accept my dog: the landlady is charging five euros extra for the privilege. I don’t receive a reply to my question whether this includes breakfast or not. But bringing pets, she says, is allowed in principle. So I’m using the remote control to consult the comrade on the corner up where the wall and the ceiling of the room meet, to call up the weather forecast. No change in sight. It will remain hot and dry. Fabulous weather for tourists, bad …

One early morning on my Algarve trail I keep thinking about a dream, a story I‘d still like to tell here. The dream is about a group of young people who in their village along the trail start planting a small tree, then a second, a third… They agree that every day they will plant another tree together along the trail’s edge, so that those still young trees may, one fine day day in the future, when these trees have grown to be tall and strong, provide shade and offer up free fruit to their children and their children’s children. …

On a Sunday in October in this warm and dry year, at the tail end of a summer that shows no signs of wanting to end, I pull the door shut behind me, lock it, shoulder my backpack and start walking east, with my dog for company. I‘ve taken a week‘s time out for myself: a week with no computers, a life without Internet. In reality I want to take the track starting right behind my house, a trail leading into nature or, well, what is left of it after the great forest fire of 2018. After a few kilometres …