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Postcard from Portugal

There must have been over 500 goats munching away in this field or, to be accurate, on this patch of land. In this part of the Algarve there are few fields. There are acres and acres of uncultivated land, all privately owned, all unsellable because of the regulations that prevent building on countryside plots unless there is a ruin in place.

I’ve often seen a man with half a dozen goats leading them from bush to bush (the Portuguese use a lot of goat meat and eat a lot of Goat’s milk cheese): there’s even a scrap yard up the road with its own small herd of goats, which sleep on the bonnets of abandoned cars, but 500 goats at once, with just one man and a dog to keep them off the road… the patch of land is not fenced, of course.

And the next day, they were gone, presumably off to the next patch of land. The only similar sight I can remember was in a drought some years ago when farmers from up country brought their flocks of sheep in lorries to the still grassy land of the Algarve, grazed them, and drove onto other grasslands. Not much of that in Highland Perthshire, I imagine.

Nor do the houses in Highland Perthshire have shutters over every window; even apartments in the Algarve have roll-down steel shutters. The only reason for this fashion appears to be a wish to prevent the sun fading the furniture and curtains, a wish that is so strong that one of our neighbours, by no means an eccentric, lives and dines and watches TV in his garage, to avoid spoiling the three piece suite which, a spy tells me, is still covered in the original plastic covers.

And another piece of Algarve life is the pre-Lent Carnival. Even the smallest town has a carnival procession, but in the Algarve equivalent of Perth the carnival lasts three days with bands and floats full of half naked ladies.  I exaggerate; the ladies are seven eighths naked with judiciously applied body paint.

No point in hopping on a plane, Carnival finished on 5 February!