Portugal

This past week we travelled to the Algarve Region of Portugal, which is the most southwestern tip of Europe.  We flew to Faro and then hired a van to take us to the fishing village of Salema.

Here is the view from our hotel of the Salema Beach.

Looking up from the road back at our hotel, The Mare.  This was a really nice place, about 150 yards from the sand.  A very nice couple run the place and serve breakfast in the morning.

Salema is still a fishing village.  Here are some of the boats parked on the sand.  They used to use ropes and manpower to bring them out of the water, but now the town has one tractor to do all the work.

These clay pots are actually octopus traps.  The pots are placed in the water where octopus finds them and hide in them.  The fisherman pull the pots up to their boat and "mace" them with bleach and the octopus quickly flops out.

And here are some of the locals.  They stick to the shade most places.

On one day, we decided to go for a hike along the cliffs at the edge of town.  They were pretty steep and rocky.

Our hike ended at Figuera Beach (just a beach, no town).  As you can see, there were only two people here when we showed up.

On our last day, we hired a local, Sebastian, to take us on a tour of the coast in his boat.  One of the most interesting rock formations was this one, which he said was called "The Three Chapels."

This is a faraway shot of Cape Sagres, or back when the earth was flat and the sun revolved around us, it was the "End of the Earth."  Sail too far away from here and you might fall off the side or be eaten by a sea monster. Now there is a hot dog stand with the sign, "Last Hot Dog Before America!"

Sebastian's boat was able to navigate into some of the natural caves.  Here is a view from inside one looking back out at the Atlantic Ocean.

P.S.  Thank you for all the comments from our last post.  Brian was very excited to read them all.