Travel
Portugal for the Traveller
IT'S a very ill wind which blows good to no one ; and the high cost of living in so many favourite haunts abroad is helping us to discover others. Probably it is just as well that we should cease to be Bruges- or Florence-minded. In any case, Por- tugal is new and full of attractions, which not even the most loyal beefeater need be ashamed to devour, since that country followed England into the War and off gold. The Romans arc said to have called it Lusitania.
There is no other country in Europe where so much variety of scenery exists in so small an area. Again, Portugal's ocean breezes and southerly position combine tropical flowers with a temperate climate. April and May are the best months in the year for travel in this country, but along the 'Atlantic coast it is rarely too hot and mosquitoes are not numerous : they say that the flies come over the frontier only with Spanish visitors, and, incidentally, that no good wind or wife conies out of Spain.
It is of as primary importance that the Portuguese should not be confused with Spaniards as the Angles with the Saxons, or Mr. Osbert with Mr. Sacheverell Sitwell. Racially, they are different and history has widened the cleft. On two occasions the Spaniards have had to be turned out of the country at the end of periods of conquest. Temperamentally, the people are different. Phlegmatic, kindly and honest with strangers, the Portuguese is the ideal hotel-keeper or taxi-man for the English visitor. This is just as well, since the language is extraordinarily difficult ; at times it seems as little Latin as Rumanian. However, educated Portuguese almost inevitably speak French ; and the rest show the natural quick-wittedness of the illiterate with a charming readiness to help which is entirely their own.
Travel is probably cheaper than anywhere else in Europe. The escudo is worth twopence-farthing, and ten escudoes will buy a six-course meal almost anywhere. Rooms cost five to seven shillings a night in Lisbon ; two or three shillings a night in the country hotels, which are sound, hard-pillowed and well-endowed with disinfectants under the auspices of a first-rate service of tourist development. Half a bottle of wine has to be included in the price of every table d'hote meal : it has a pleasant tang new to most English palates. First- class railway fare in Portugal costs slightly less than third class in England, and there are numercias motor-bus routes along roads which, though occasionally shocking, are rapidly becoming first-rate.
In brief, Portugal is still the " Eden " which Lord Byron termed it. Spring is the best time for a visit, and the visitor will do well to start in the Algarve: Portugars moit southerly province. He may then move northwards with the year, fmding warm weather and azaleas to gladden his path. There is a strong African element in the Algarve. Not only was this province the last conquered from the Moors, but it was partly and purposely repopulated by negroes in the eighteenth century. White colour predominates, and the blend has been successful. The Algarvio is a talkative, simple creature not given particularly to emotions.. White houses with-chimneys shaped like minarets, black felt-hatted -women and the asses on which they-ride are everywhere. The mountains are beautiful in the pleasant, absurd way of many modern dust-covers.
-Further north, in Alemtejo, there is little to be seen but cork forests and whiskered farmers, who have all the patient dignity and slightly lost look of English gentlemen in early nineteenth-century prints of colonial life.
Just behind lies Lisbon : it is the obvious port of arrival for the traveller and an excellent taste of the country, best however digested at leisure after hors d'oeuvres in the Algarve. Striding as many hills as Rome, and with a finer view if not so many historic associations' Lisbon must be ranked among the most beautiful capitals of Europe. Its houses, with their gay coats of pink, yellow and lavender, the exotic plants and strident but attractive cries of pedlars add to a superb charm in position. Most of the pedlars seem to be fishwives, who combine heavy gold earrings withlare legs. There are admir- able public and other buildings constructed after the earth- quake of 1755.. Mercifully, there is not too much unavoidable sightseeing to be done. What there is—the extravagant Manoeline Gothic monastery and baroque churches at Belem— ranks among the first class. Morbid tourists usually extract the wrong sort of pleasure from the bodies of dead—indeed murdered—Portuguese kings which may be seen for an escudo in the Church of San Vicente, Don Carlos still wears his imperial, and Catherine of Braganza, who married Charles II and brought Bombay to England, although invisible lies in a coffin covered with visiting cards, some of them from the conductors of jaiz-bands and Hollywood celebrities.
North of Lisbon lie the most beautiful buildings and most picturesque landscapes in Portugal. In Estremadura, a fertile province quite unlike its dreary Spanish namesake, are Batalha and Alcoiraca, perhaps the most gorgeous and fantastic Gothin buildings in the world. It looks as though the Portuguese had experienced and learnt from the East- before they acquired Goa and Macao. Towards the frontier in the Beira are many attractive mountain villages, their noblemen's houses embla- zoned with arms and sombre churches lightened by the de- lightful blue and white tiles (azulejos) which are a special triumph of the Portuguese.
To the north lies the Douro, England's vineyard,- whence port is shipped and members of that select club, the Factory House, drink as much of that wine as they like free of charge from luncheon time till three in the afternoon. The narrow Douro valley, -with its schist formation and blood-red sailed ships, is one of the most interesting districts of Europe. It bears the proud name of Pais do Vinho (Country of Wine) and abounds in hospitable " quintas " where the port shippers have houses and charming little aristocratic towns like Penatiel and Amarante or Lamego and Villa Real, which lie just outside the Douro province.
A few miles up the coast from Oporto and one is in the Minho territory, where furze, stone walls, wayside shrines, assert a strong Celtic tradition. Actually, this province and the neighbouring Spanish Galicia may well be the last conti- nental home of the Gaels before they went on to conquer Ireland and Scotland. The skies are as fine, as rainy, and as changeable as Connacht and the " rias " as deep and narrow as the ICerry- coast. There are big mountains, too, in the Anti° and the people have fire in them. Nowhere else are the lovely, mouse-coloured oxen of Portugal so grand ; their long horns spread six feet apart, and their yokes are decorated with scroll-work which might have been copied from Miss Yeats or the Book of Kells. On the bare hillside of Citania are the ruins of a hundred beehive huts. And down below the people are merry and impulsive, quick t6 love and quick to hate, as they are to-day in Ireland or any country which has never quite grown up.
MARTIN MACLAUGHLIN.
Previous page
