Olhão Photo Blog
All photos © Kirsty Hughes
The Algarve’s largest fishing port is in the small town of Olhão. But in mid-January with a cold wind and scattered showers passing through, it feels quiet like an out-of-season tourist place (which it is, in part, too).
But then the sun returns, the Saturday market is in full swing, and the locals are thronging the market cafes, with their coffees often chased or paired with a beer, and it suddenly comes back to life.
Olhão sits just a few kilometres west of the main transport hub Faro. It looks over the Ria Formosa lagoon/nature park which runs all the way west for around 60 kilometres to the border with Spain.
The lagoon is tidal so mud flats, salt marshes and islets appear and disappear as the waters rise and fall. These wetlands are very precious.
One of the delights of visiting is the extraordinary range of bird life, not least the cormorants skimming the surface of the water or diving for fish on the lagoon-front just beyond the market cafes, or sitting with egrets, oystercatchers and others on smaller and larger tidal flats waiting for the feast that low tides offer.
There are over 200 bird species and 100 fish species in and around the lagoon as well as thousands of migratory birds whether heading north or south depending on the time of year.
There are flamingos, storks, avocets, stilts, grey plovers and a whole range of other birds all dipping their varying-length beaks in the uncovered mud to find clams and other delicacies.
One day, walking around the local salt pans, an amazing place to easily see a whole array of birds, I even see an osprey soaring overhead.
It's not only the birds who like low tides. As soon as the water is low enough clam and oyster fishermen can be seen digging in the mud with their buckets ready to take their findings.
There are many clam and oyster farms in the Ria Formosa nature park – and concerns about the damage they can do if too extensive to sea grass that amongst other things offers a habitat for seahorses – and some worry the growth of oysters relative to clams is creating another imbalance.
The fishing fleets must head out beyond the lagoon to fish, as it is a protected area. But pollution has also occurred due to inadequately regulated sewage outflows. And the weight of tourism and larger industrial agriculture and recent droughts all add to the pressures.
It is, though, a beautiful place and, despite those pressures, a haven of biodiversity too.
This part of the Algarve has been inhabited since neolithic times. The Romans were here, and when I walk around the Quinta de Marim nature reserve, also the home of the nature park’s headquarters, on the edge of town, there are ruins of Roman salt tanks where they used to cure fish.
Today, half of Portugal’s salt production – and half of shellfish output – comes from the Algarve. The nature reserve is also home to an old tide mill, the tide was dammed in the mill at high tide and let out at low tide to drive the grinders of the grain. It finally stopped operating in 1970.
The Moors followed on a few centuries after the Romans, from around the 8th to 13th centuries, their presence visible in notable sights like the red sandstone Moorish castle at Silves, just below the hills and mountains that overlook the western Algarve.
I spend a couple of nights just below the Algarve’s highest point, above Silves, even above the high village of Monchique – in a small, eco-hotel, run by a friendly family. It’s called Montalma or soul of the mountain, very apt.
In the forests covering the hills and mountains, there are pine trees, eucalyptus, cork oaks (many with the bottom half of their trunks bare from the cork harvest and a number scrawled on the bare part to tell the farmers when that tree can be harvested again – several years hence). And there are stunning views down through the tree-covered hills to the distant haze of the coast.
Cows and their calves wander the rough road through the trees. And, as I walk through the high valley – in clearings between the forest there are small houses with orange rooves, terraces, lemon trees, running streams – an old man with a stick and an old-fashioned jacket comes up to ask where I’m from and wish me a good journey.
Back in Olhão, there are regular ferries out to the small villages and barrier islands of Armona and Culatra. The locals cram downstairs on the ferry with their wheely trolleys full of produce (or sometimes with a dog sat inside a trolley or bag as dogs are not allowed loose on the ferries) while the tourists brave the cooler winds and beautiful views on the upstairs/outdoors deck.
There’s a sense of a vast space here – the flat islets that appear and disappear with the tides, occasional streaks of bright green grass – the sky arching overhead.
Culatra has a fishing district, the small harbour crammed with boats, seagulls perched all along the rooves of the small, dark brown fishermen’s huts, the fishermen themselves to be seen mending nets under the watchful eye of the gulls.
A longish walk through the small, almost toytown white houses of the village takes you to the outer side of the island – a beautiful empty Atlantic beach beyond the dunes, all a shifting part of the Ria Formosa ecosystem.
Olhão itself became a town in 1808, a token of gratitude from the King for its inhabitants’ part in fighting against Napoleon. There’s a replica of the boat, the Bom Sucesso, tied up in the lagoon in front of the two red brick market buildings. The original boat took the good news of Napoleon’s defeat to the Portuguese court in Brazil.
Olhão is in part a warren of narrow backstreets and small fishermen’s houses, and then in part there are larger graceful buildings including the main church (with its inevitable stork’s nest on one of its towers) and the museum building that was once the home of the fishermen’s mutual society.
Many houses speak of better days, with tall windows and graceful wrought iron balconies but flaking paintwork. One faded but grand old building houses the local arts centre, Republica18, where every Saturday night there’s live music – attracting Portuguese and tourists alike – I hear Brazilian lute and tambourine players, a pianist and mouth organ player and more.
Olhão, and the Ria Formosa nature park, are beautiful, unique places to visit, with a multi-layered life, history, culture still vibrant despite the waves of visitors too. My winter visit has been special indeed.
