The Goldilocks Zone

Fresh off of a great day in Cascais, we packed up the next morning after breakfast and made the easy hour and fifteen minute drive to Foz do Arelho, the next of our scheduled stops. On paper Foz do Arelho could not be any different from Cascais. Where Cascais is a vibrant medium-sized town in the shadow of Lisbon, Foz do Arelho (pronounced fazh doo ah-RELL-yo), is more of a sleepy hamlet. The greater Foz do Arelho area has 1600 or so residents spread out through the hills and the town-proper appears to have just a few hundred residents.

Foz do Arelho is across the Óbidos lagoon from the ancient walled city of Óbidos (pronounced OH-bee-dosh), with the Óbidos castle within the walls being a popular tourist destination. The Óbidos lagoon was our main reason for stopping in Foz do Arelho. The shallow sandy lagoon is fed by the rivers around Foz do Arelho and the channel to the ocean at the mouth of the lagoon is only passable when the tide is in. The area where the fresh water flows into the lagoon is composed of beautiful wetlands that seem to host lots of wildlife.

The overall geography is hills with freshwater streams and rivers feeding into the back half of the lagoon and picturesque sand dunes transitioning to cliffs fronting The Atlantic on both the north and south of the lagoon. It’s beautiful.

Jill booked us a room at the Quinta da Foz, in the center of Foz do Arelho for just one night. The Quinta da Foz which is the ancestral manse of Francisco, the current proprietor, dates back to 1568 and is fantastic.

The property used to have a hundred cultivated hectares that stretched all the way down to the lagoon, but parcels of land have been sold off through the centuries and what’s left is the manor house with a few hectares behind the house for the livestock and crops. There’s an exceptionally friendly Great Dane, named Foz, who greets all the guests upon arrival.

We arrived before lunch at Quinta da Foz and, luckily, Francisco had our room ready early. We dropped our bags in the room and at Francisco’s direction started walking downhill toward the lagoon in search of lunch. There’s only one main street in Foz do Arelho so we just followed that street until we got to the lagoon and then a little further along the banks of the lagoon to a small group of restaurants that are built out onto the beach that fronts the lagoon.

We didn’t see a soul on the walk until we got within sight of the lagoon, where there was a caravan park with a few late season camper-van tourists playing along the water’s edge. Over the course of that walk we pretty quickly categorized Foz do Arelho as being too sleepy to be a viable candidate as a place to live, but the geography was right in our sweet spot. Once again we were freed up to be tourists.

The restaurants were just a little further on and we had no trouble getting a table given that we were at the tail end of tourist season.

Everything was going swimmingly at lunch until I made the rookie mistake of ordering a “hamburger” at a restaurant that clearly specialized in seafood. Jill even tried to warn me off by asking “Are you sure?” It was actually a “sausage burger” with kind of mushy pork sausage in lieu of a beef patty. Nothing catastrophic happened, but I will endeavor not to make that mistake again.

After lunch we continued walking a little further down the road and found a surfer-themed cafe, where we enjoyed a post-lunch cappuccino in the early afternoon sun. We have become BIG fans of these cafes in Portugal. They’re a reliable place to grab a coffee or a toastie (or both) and it’s always a great experience.

Topped up with caffeine we ambled back the way we’d come, checking out the rest of the town along the way. We found a corner shop near the hotel to buy some sparking water and snacks.

We spent a lazy afternoon back at the Quinta da Foz reading on the balcony watching the peacocks and other members of the resident menagerie.

For dinner we hopped into our Renault Clio and found a delicious seafood place just past the surfer cafe where we’d enjoyed our afternoon cappuccinos. This time I CORRECTLY ordered us a large bowl of the small local clams poached in a delicious buttery garlicky broth that we soaked up with rustic bread.

We left the restaurant around 9PM and it was capital D DARK. So, we had a great view of the stars on the walk to the Clio. And we used the flashlight on my phone to get through the gate at the Quinta da Foz and to our room.

The next morning we had a delicious communal breakfast in the manor house with the 6 other guests and Francisco took us on a tour of the house.

After breakfast we packed up and headed toward our next destination, which was Nazaré, about a 30 minute drive from Foz do Arelho. If you’ve run across the HBO series “100 Foot Wave”, that’s mostly filmed in Nazaré. Prior to the surfers discovering the big waves in Nazaré about 10 years ago, it was a sleepy fishing village that had some beach tourism in the summer time. Now Nazaré is a year round tourist destination, with the beachgoers in the warm season and the surfers in the winter months. Just based on what we’d seen on HBO and heard from our friends Ron and Mike (more on that in a moment) Jill and I were both thinking that Nazaré might hold a lot of promise as a possible place to live.

Once we decided to move to Portugal, we were introduced to Ron and Mike by a mutual acquaintance. Ron and Mike live about 25 minutes from us in Lakeway and are also planning to move to Portugal. They are building a house in Famalicão, which is on the inland side of the coastal ridge on the road between Foz do Arelho and Nazaré. Jill and I had made plans to drive by Ron and Mike’s while we were in Nazaré to send them some pictures of the construction progress.

There was also one more coastal town on the way, São Martinho do Porto (SMP), population of around 3,000 people. We’d planned to just do a drive by of SMP – thinking 3,000 people was a little on the small side.

It’s funny how things work out. From our first glimpse of SMP we were smitten.

We immediately decided that we needed to stop in SMP and explore the town. First stop? You guessed it… a cappuccino and a toastie at a cafe fronting the harbor.

We enjoyed a leisurely cappuccino, a “tosta mixta” (ham and cheese toastie), and a bottle of the local sparkling water and just watched the morning unfolding around us in SMP. The cafe had, and I take this as an omen, the exact same automated payment kiosk that we’d learned to use at the Belo Cantinho in Lagos. When we were ready to leave and go explore SMP on foot, I went and stood by the kiosk and waited for our server to make eye contact with me, whereupon he did his bit and I did my bit – depositing €8 in notes against our €7,10 bill and deftly dropping the coins returned out by the kiosk into the coffee can doubling as a tip jar on the top of the kiosk. With an “Obrigado!” to our server we were off.

We walked rest of the way around the harbor and came across, in no particular order, a number of perfectly serviceable dining outlets (Indian, Mediterranean, Italian/Pizza, fish and chips, seafood, gelato, and a hamburgueria – which I will view with a skeptical eye now that I’ve been burned once), a large green space right on the harbor with a lady walking a Labrador retriever, and an intriguing high-end hotel – called The Storyteller’s Palace – that looks like our kind of happy hour destination.

There’s also a tunnel through the headland at the far end of the harbor that goes out to the Atlantic. That was an interesting juxtaposition because the harbor was dead calm, but the Atlantic Ocean had plenty of energy outside the protected harbor.

At that point, we’d seen enough make three quick conclusions:

1. With 3,000 people, SMP was not “too small” as I’d assumed it would be. It even has an Intermarché, the fabulous French super market we’d first experienced in Carvoeiro! And one of the clear benefits of a town the size of SMP is that there is green space within easy walking distance of town center. In fact it’s better than that. We’d passed an extensive boardwalk/walking trail on our way into town with lots of people walking their dogs along the water’s edge.
2. Unlike the expat resort flavor of the Algarve, SMP is a town full of Portuguese people. But we saw enough expats in that first visit to believe that there was enough of an English-speaking population for us to find a friend group while we are getting our Portuguese up to scratch. Plus our friends Ron and Mike are building a house 5km away.
3. With two Cascais-sized towns – Nazaré having 20k people and Caldas da Rainha having 50k people – within 20 minutes, anything that SMP doesn’t have is only 20 minutes away.

We were trying to keep our excitement in check, plus we still hadn’t seen Nazaré yet. So, after our walking tour of the SMP harbor area we strolled back to our car and headed off for Nazaré to see how it stacked up.