Perigord and pinxtos: Egrejas decked with Azulejos

Portugal is even scruffier than Spain: all N roads (national routes, typically) are so full of pot-holes that, any day now, I expect to hear a loud blow-out tyre rupture. The road shoulders are paved somewhat raggedly, the verges thick with healthy weeds that don’t even look edible; and collecting discarded rubbish is not a priority along Portuguese roadsides.

Still there is an enormous amount of road-work and apartment-building (as in Spain) going on, so there is money about and being spent. It is in the finishing off -- the final touches: the edges, the verges, the completion of these jobs -- where very little attention to detail is ever paid.

Yet, rising up in the middle of most of these shabby grey little villages are these astonishing churches (called ‘egreja’ here) with heavily decorated facades – all high spires and glorious azulejo (a-zoo-lay’-zhoo) tiles. Irresistible.

My taste is minimalist, and azulejo tiles are anything but minimalist in their concept or design. But paste a wall of these densely-patterned heavily-decorative tiles against the clean simple grey lines of an old rectangular set of stone doors or window frames and you have a style of minimalist elegance which we don’t often get to see at home.

I had to come to Portugal to even comprehend it.

So the world could be litter and lax, but if there were walls of azulejo tiles within cooee -- I would be completely charmed.

And church interiors are even more outrageous in Portugal than in Spain. Wood, for altars that are built high to the vaulted ceilings even around interior alcoves, has been curled, carved, and densely coloured in thick layers of gold paint.

Heaven surely figures as gold in Portugal thinking.

Outside these egrejas, and down shabby roads, peasant potato farmers and yuppy apartment dwellers appear to live in such close proximity along the coast of Portugal that it is difficult to conceive how either is completely happy with the other being there -- so completely different is their focus, their taste, and their purpose for being there.

The hodge-podge of ancient, worn, stone, sprawling, untidy-almost-to-derelict farm buildings contrasts with the hard-edged modern, white-painted, ticky-tacky, box-like apartments in the next lot – virtually none of it blends.

One has to assume, though, that some of these potato farmers are poor no more: that they have been tempted by gold dust: seduced into selling off their little patches of land to high-bidding apartment developers.

Sad, it is – as much of the new is generic and will not age well, while most of the old is crumbling and so near to ruin it may never be retrievable.

We spent so much time exploring in so much detail the harbour and the historic centre of Viana do Castelo that we ended up having to camp there the night.

The Celts built a settlement there (called a ‘citania’) -- on the little hill of Monte de Santa Luzia which overlooks what is now considered the old and the new town. Where the Celts lived now sits a rather gorgeous little stone basilica, high up, that looks for all the world like Sacre Coeur in Paris. So similar.

And down in the cobbled back streets of the little harbour town of Viana do Castelo there is a colourful calle (street) named for Vasco da Gama--and many buildings and squares throughout this little town sport similar seafaring symbols of sculpture and motif that herald its seafaring history. Da Gama became a great hero in his home country of Portugal, for establishing a route to the exotic spices along the coast of India, despite the horror and brutality of his treatment of many of the locals.

Miss Bec spent time cavorting with enticing blue, green and yellow stone men in one of the squares in town.

Even today the simple working-mans' harbour is alive and thriving. We were welcomed into a jovial fisherman’s boat shed to watch as he set about repairing nets for his next big jaunt. We were taught how to rope floats on to his new triple layered fishing net, how to bind these in, to knot, then twist them securely. Further along the dock little old ladies, out of little old dockside sea shanties, where the walls smell of centuries of brine and seafood stain, were selling the excess of last night’s sea haul: off with their fishy heads and scales, a swift swipe into a bucket for one last seawater splash, then a slash or two with a knife down the middle, and voila!– sea-fresh fillets wrapped in newspaper--dinner!