Portugal loves its festas and, when summer arrives, the street parties get started.
Across the country, live music stages are springing up on every corner and you can’t move for parades, bunting and long outdoor dining tables.
The Santos Populares – or Popular Saints celebrations – started off the festa season by shutting down Lisbon and Porto with a sea of sardine feasts, and here in coastal Alentejo it’s the Marchas Populares which bring the Sagres and Super Bock beer vans out of winter storage.
It’s unusually hot unseasonally early this year, the beach guards are on high alert, and our supermarkets are newly stocked with suncream and beach umbrellas.
Our nearest town of São Teotónio has its annual ceiling of handmade paper ribbons as the traditional mastros festival (of masts) is underway, and music festivals across the country are filling the calendars from now until the autumn.
Having just opened our doors for guests at our new tourist lodge – and being happily surprised at the number of bookings we’re already getting – we don’t have as much time as we used to.
We have to choose which festivals to visit, and one event that no self-respecting establishment like ours can afford to miss is Fei-Tur: the local tourism festival.
Being in Vila Nova de Milfontes and on the fabulous Mira River estuary, the Feira de Turismo do SW leans heavily on surf schools and stand-up paddle boarding.
But it’s a feira packed with local producers, peddling cheese and wine, honey and olive oil, preserves and cakes com or sem gluten.
After a long weekend, I now have a tote-bag full of business cards and flyers, contacts for local suppliers and some really good local stories to tell.
There were medronho-makers and woodcarvers, craft stores and cooking demonstrations and a constant stream of musicians and dancers taking their turn on the stage.
It’s a great reminder of all the things visitors to our area can see and do – beyond visiting all the amazing beaches – and it leads to constant edits and additions to the room guides we’ve been compiling for our guests over the past few weeks.
Horse riding, motorcross schools, freediving courses, birdwatching guides, kayak tours and boat trips, and foiling … whatever that is.
But at the heart of it all is the hundreds of kilometres of walking and cycling paths which are bringing thousands more visitors to our Costa Vicentina every year.
The number of people hitting the trails is growing at an astonishing rate – the bars and restaurants along the clifftop route of the Fisherman’s Trail are constantly busy with resting hikers from all over the world newly discovering our wild Atlantic coast.
The Rota Vicentina had a whole line of exhibition tents at this year’s Fei-Tur festival and was promoting cycling routes as well as the stunning inland long-distance hiking path and the circular trails.
Pedro Almeida is the head of cycling, and he was buzzing with excitement over the free downloadable maps, a new range of automatic bicycle service stations and how electric bikes are attracting a new type of cyclist.
“The Fisherman’s Trail is incredibly popular as people want to see the coast – and it’s a beautiful coast,” he said.
“But we have so many circular walking and cycling routes and we’d like to bring people here for slow tourism and natural tourism – to spend more time in one place and learn more about the local food and culture.”
Many long-distance hikers stay in a different town or village each night as they hike all or some of the 226.5km from São Torpes (near Sines) to Sagres and across to Lagos.
Tour companies shuttle people and luggage around and the local guesthouses are heaving, but a lot more work to do with one-night stops replacing week-long visits.
It is something we’ve already realised running a small eco-luxe lodge: the turnover costs push us towards a two- or three-night minimum stay.
But with trailhead drop-offs and pick-ups, local bike hire suggestions, scenic circular routes, and a peaceful place to return to, we believe we’re offering something a bit different.
I mean, who doesn’t want to rest their legs by the pool after a long day on the trails, sip a glass of Alentejo wine and enjoy a fresh fish or black pork dinner with a stunning view?
“We want to encourage responsible travel and responsible tourism: to attract people to do more different activities. There are boat rides, a birdwatching festival – and of course cycling,” said Pedro Almeida.
“The great thing about e-bikes now is you don’t have to be an athlete or to bring your own bike with you – you just need to know how to ride a bike and then you can discover more places.”
And as luck would have it, the focus of the Rota Vicentina circular walking and cycling paths is all around us and the inland Historical Way crosses the bottom of our valley.
We’ve got a feeling we’re going to be busy and have taken on our first official member of staff – Krishna Shrestha from Waling in the western region of Nepal (a bit south of Pokhara).
The man’s the machine … and so is our second hire: in the fast-changing world in which we live, it will be no surprise to hear we recruited a robot.
Our daughter Oda hit the perfect creative chord by christening the pool cleaning WyBot Herbert Hoover, who is already making a big impact on the infinity pool … if not yet also beyond.
The SW coast of Alentejo is well worth a visit for hiking, biking, wine tasting, surfing … and foiling.
We love our Atlantic coast and while we keep quiet about our hidden coves and wild beaches, a lot more people are now starting to discover this still quite secret corner of the country.
