Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS

Today’s Five-Minute Friday episode is about the time when I moved my family – my wife and my two little kids – to Portugal, in the spring of 2019.

We moved to Portugal for three months were we ended up living in a town called Atouguia Da Baleia, near one of the surfing capitals of Portugal – Peniche. It was pretty close to the beach. We were in this tiny village because it happened to have another digital nomad friend. She happened to mention that place before we were going. It was just perfect. She had an AirBnb rental where we stayed at and to add to that, she let us use her car. Everything worked out.

What was it like for our family when we moved there?

From St. Louis, we flew to Lisbon. We then had about an hour drive to this small village of about ten thousand people. We haven’t really lived anywhere that small. It was a quiet and chill place, pretty different from living in Lisbon. Lisbon, on the other hand, is a digital nomad and entrepreneurship hotspot. There are a lot of start-ups and friends over there who travel through.

We didn’t know what to expect. We did not end up meeting as many friends as we did in other places. So, when people asked us, “How was Portugal?” it is kind of, hard for us to say because every day was really nice. There are beautiful things to do. The place was quiet and calm. The weather was great. The thing that was missing was proximity to a lot of people that we could get to know.

Here are some of the highlights of our stay: 

I went cycling and saw so much scenery. I could see little villages, farm roads, different castles, rivers, and mountains. While I was out riding, I was thinking to myself about the development of the country, Portugal. At one point, they had this massive empire. Essentially, they were the first to have a global empire. They have since declined and the glorious buildings built long ago are now in a state of despair. The country, however, is now coming back, economically speaking. It is starting to revitalize.

I am just imagining this ebb and flow of the culture of Portugal and its people. There is this type of music, the Fado music, which is popular in Portugal. It is like this longing-for-the-days-gone-by, sort of, folk music, and that feeling, pervaded every place I went. It is hard to think of another country where the music is so appropriately described; that you would just like to be there.

I was surprised that it was so windy in Portugal. There were wind turbines, old and modern ones, everywhere. Apparently until recently, Portugal was the leading wind power producer.

We happened to live near this town called Obidos, a medieval old-walled city. There is a castle and old walls in this city, which is super beautiful which have been preserved, frozen in time. It is very touristy now because of its beauty. We would regularly go just to spend the evening, for dinner, or when anyone came to visit us. We would show them this jewel of a city. They say it is the most beautiful city in Portugal.

We also took a road trip to Sevilla, Spain, which I think is even cooler than Lisbon. We would eat dinner super late at night and I could remember walking home at eleven in the evening and buying ice cream with my two-year old. This is very out of the ordinary, but it was super fun. The trip was made interesting by the great architecture of the place. We also went to where all the beaches were.

Another interesting thing we saw on our way over to Spain is this place outside a town called Evora. We visited the Cromeleque dos Almendres which means, stone circles. It was like the Stonehenge, but with almond-shaped stones and older, over 5000 years old. It was just special, way out of the middle of nowhere and the hot part drive of Portugal.

A lot of people in Portugal spoke English, so we were able to get by pretty well. As you might imagine, the food and wine is really good. We always had this wonderful seafood dish because we lived next to a fishing village, which is like a seafood soup called Caldeirada As for the wine, you can’t find a lot of them anywhere else because they have certain types of grapes that don’t grow anywhere else, and they don’t produce enough volume for export. You really have to go to Portugal to try some of these varieties of wine. Another peak experience was when I went to this bike race and afterwards, there was this big feast and they were roasting a pig on a stick which is a very traditional way of doing it. We gorged ourselves on the food after the bike ride.

There are also a lot of caves in the area where we lived. I was constantly cycling and I would see caves up on a cliff or on the side of the road. One of them is this grouping of caves up a canyon where we were able to go and take the kids. We called it bear hunting and we explored five or six caves that day.

Near where we were living, were a lot of sea cliffs. We ended up doing a lot of sunset walks. We have this dramatic dunes and tide pools, which I appreciated a lot. It is nice to have that contrast because these were things we do not normally get.

So that was basically what it was like for me and my family during our stay in a tiny town in Portugal. If you are going to go, start with Lisbon and go to the countryside to understand and experience more of their culture. Surely, you will enjoy the stay, like we did.