What fills this first page on adventures while wandering Albufeira is information about what we encountered when sightseeing. We were now fully awake and recovered from travel fatigue, no longer feeling like bags of hammers, and ready to go. Hope you enjoy.
This is a multi-page blog about our first trip from Canada to Portugal. This is not the first page. This is the link to page one if you wish to start at the beginning!
Are we there yet?
The first question. How do we get to old town from where our rental was located, given that we were no longer right in Old Town. Why we’re not is covered on page one.
Our route to old Town Albufeira from our Albufeira rental.
Google maps showed that it was only 5 km or so, we were feeling quite fine, we set off walking to Old Town Albufeira.
Walking to Old Town Albufeira.
Google suggested it should take an hour and 8 minutes. Since I am a 6’2″ tall corpulent slug, it took us about one and one half hours of tough walking. I held Sue back, she’d have been there in an hour, for sure.
How is it, that in a 5km walk 4km of it was uphill?
Walking in the Algarve! Caution!
I’m adding this long after this page was originally written. We aren’t in terrible shape, but let me tell you, walking from anywhere to anywhere in Albufeira or in any other location in the Algarve, will mean a significant portion of it will be uphill, and sometimes up quite steep streets. If walking is a problem for you, don’t give up on the Algarve. Just be prepared to use some form of transit (Uber etc.) to get from the down to the up.
Consider renting a car though the problem with that is parking anywhere near where tourists like to congregate is very, very scarce. As a result, much walking may still be required with much of it uphill!
Weather in Albufeira in January / February:
Update: As I update this page we’ve now been here in Albufeira, Algarve, Portugal for just over a month. The first few weeks here the weather was wonderful. The temperatures overnight were typically 10 to 13 degree C range. By mid-morning we’ll typically reach 15 to 16 degrees C, and by lunch it’s been 19 and 20 degrees C each day with lots of sun.
In late February winter storms coming in off the Atlantic and impacting the northwest of Portugal drove cooler, wetter air down into the Algarve. Winds, which according to locals blow consistently in this area, were now coming from the north instead of in off the ocean from the south, and it got cooler. Not dramatically. One or two degrees C. Night time temps reached, on one night only, 7C. Daytime temps the next day hit only 17C.
Mind you, if you are coming from cold, wet snow, these are pretty fine temperatures, aren’t they, so no complaints from me, for sure.
Unfortunately for the entire Algarve region, there has been little rain. We’ve had a few overcast days, we’ve had days with intermittent clouds and sun all day, and we’ve had about four days on which the rain caused any kind of disruption in our plans.
All in all, the weather here is wonderful compared to a typical Canuck winter.
What clothes to bring to Albufeira?
Given that we were flying out of the Toronto airport, and it was definitely winter there, we embarked wearing heavier gear. Coats, sweathers and heavy shirts, long pants, socks, and comfortable walking shoes.
Do bring those. Also bring light sweaters and a light windbreaker which will typically what will be worn early and late.
A backpack allows travellers to wear more in the a.m., remove layers as the day gets warmer, and add those clothes back on as the afternoon wanes into typically a quite cool evening.
Photos from our first walk into Albufeira in late January.
The weather was just fine! The photos are not necessarily in the correct order.
We pass dozens of restaurants, about half of which are open late January. The rest won’t open until the date gets closer to the Algarve peak visitor season which seems to begin in March.
Not unexpectedly, the closer we got to old Albufeira and the waterfront, the prices rose The prices above were in a small group of services clumped along the route in Santa Eulalia. We still had a couple of kilometers to walk into Old Town where the same menu might be 2 or 3 times higher.
One last photo of the walk into Albufeira. Though we’d had glimpses of the ocean all along our route, this image really brought home to us that we were actually in Portugal, in the Algarve and in the distance was new Albufeira.
Old Town Albufeira.
In our wanderings, we don’t know if we saw a bit of old Albufeira, all of it, or maybe we missed the most touristic spots. No worries, we’ve just started to explore.
Signs appeared in many of the restaurant windows; Feschado! which is the masculine form of the Portuguese word for CLOSED. Lots of restaurants were closed for their traditional Holidays that take place before and sometimes after the peak tourist season.
That’s just fine by us. Some of the shops being closed is a small price to pay for being able to go anywhere and not be elbow to elbow in line ups. For example:
Portuguese Sardines!
An acquired taste for some, this is one of my favourite snacks. I’d been waiting to try this dish until I got here, though many restaurants in Lisbon offer sardines plated like you see in the photo too.
I wanted my first taste to be fresh sardines from the ocean around Albufeira. That the area is known as Fishermans Beach is no accident though we didn’t see any fishing boats today.
Tip: According to what we’ve been told, if you want to buy fresh fish, don’t purchase it on Monday. The fisherpeople don’t go out fishing on Sunday. On Monday you will be buying a catch that is at least two days old. Of course, coming from a part of Canada that’s far, far away from any ocean, two day old fish would be pretty fresh, wouldn’t it?
What did I think of my dish of sardines?
Oh my, the taste of the Sardines was absolutely wonderful. It was just that every mouthful had bones in it, lots of bones. When I read up about the sardine meals in Portugal before arriving, I understood that, like canned sardines, the grilled sardines would be cooked enough that the bones would be soft enough that they could be chewed up and swallowed. Nope!
I ate every bit of the sardines I could, but fear I left a lot of good fish on my plate due to my inability to eat them properly. I’ll have to practice!
We wander through a bit of old town Albufeira.
As mentioned earlier, we’ve just begun to explore. We are sure there’s a bunch of old town we haven’t seen as yet. Here’s just a taste.
Update: The cow is not being dragged across the street. It’s an emblem of the FORSA (I think) soccer club, and a cow much this one can be seen in various locations. It seems to identify a store from which fans can acquire all sorts of soccer (football) mementos of their favourite teams.
Getting back to our Apartment
A very nice Canuck sent us a map of the bus line in Albufeira outlining the routes of the bus that would get us back to our street east of Albufeira.
After dragging our weary bodies back up the hills to the main street to a much newer Albufeira some call New Town, we found a bus stop. With the information provided we were happy to see a number 9 bus would take us back to our street where a short walk up would bring us to our digs.
Unfortunately, it wasn’t clear for us what route that bus travelled. After checking with the driver and being told yes, this was the bus to Caminho da Semina (our street), we slumped back in our seats for quite a long ride before the bus came to a full stop and the driver stood up, and asked (in Portuguese) why was everybody still on the bus?
Puzzled? You bet. The bus had not driven along the road to our street but the number 9 bus drove fro Albufeira along another route quite a bit north of were our road crossed it. Nuts! Wrong bus!
The driver commiserated with us, but still charged us another 4€ to take us back four stops to the closest he could get to our street, and afterwards we had to slug another good distance down to the other end of a long road, no sidewalks, fortunately not a ton of traffic either, to our rental.
Tip: You can buy passes for the buses in Albufeira or you can pay cash as you get on, which is what we did at first. Our fares were 2 Euro each per ride. Since the bus we took drove out of the central Albufeira billing zone, we had to pay that twice.
It didn’t take us long to get to the Rodoviario Terminal in Albufeira to purchase senior bus passes which gave us unlimited bus rides on the Giro line for a month.
Thanks for reading. Much more to come. The next page is: Tidbits about Albufeira – here’s the link.
Cheers,
Bill & Sue