Another
Day in the Algarve
That Mediterranean Magic
We turn the corner, and on the opposite side of the valley is the town with its castle walls in dark brown encircling the top of the hill. At the eastern end the walls are still intact, and propped below them are the cut-out figures of Joseph and Mary and a donkey or two surveying the crib.
The town used to be the capital of the Algarve back in the middle ages when it was a separate kingdom. Even during the last monarchy, a hundred years ago, kings were known as the kings of Portugal and the Algarve.
During the middle ages Silves was one of the largest cities in Europe, with a flourishing moorish culture. The fortifications date back to the time of the Arabic invasions during the eighth and ninth centuries. The city then grew into a thriving economic and cultural centre, with a port on the river.
Unhappily, times have changed, and Silves is one of the few modern towns that is considerably smaller now than it was a thousand years ago. The river has silted up, and although it looks impressive when the tide is in, there is merely a rivulet running across gravel at low tide.
The Moorish rule was enlightened, tolerant, and civilised. The Christian rule that followed the expulsion of the Moors was the exact opposite, with brutal repressions, economic collapse, and a retreat into a cultural backwater. Christianisation plunged the whole of the Algarve into a thousand year decline which has only been partially rescued in the last couple of decades by tourism.
The streets of the town are steep, the houses and shops higgledy-piggledy, and taking up an entire triangle surrounded by roads is a small factory with a tall brick chimney. It was once a sardine cannery. There is also the Fabrica do Ingles, which used to be a cork factory, but is now a tourist attraction.
Up in the hills around Monchique are miles and miles of cork trees, with their strange trunks, stripped of the silvery bark, leaving them brown, with white numbers painted on them. The trees are de-barked for the cork every nine or ten years, and so you will see the number of the year painted on the trunk for future reference, while along the roads are great banks of bark stacked and awaiting collection.
The cork industry is, however, dying. Everywhere there are oranges being planted instead, though Portugal still supplies more than half the world's production of cork.
In the pedestrian precinct at Silves is an estate agent run by an English couple. I look at the properties in the window, and then go in to ask about some ruins. The woman starts talking nonsense at me almost straight away, refusing to make an appointment for me to see any of the places, being very evasive, and asking me all sorts of impertinent questions. I get the impression, maybe erroneously, that it is a crooked operation.
I leave the shop and wander into another just down the road. Maybe they will act professionally.
Over the course of the next couple of hours I collect information about properties and prices, and come away with the impression that everything is disgustingly expensive. Properties seem to be at least twice the price they are in Spain, and I cant see why.
Later I discover what might have been one of the reasons. Back in the sixties there were 80 escudos to the pound. In the late sixties this rate dropped to 55 escudos to the pound. The rate that afternoon was 320.
I have no idea what inflation has been doing in Portugal since the sixties, but if it has been even remotely like that in the rest of Europe an investment in property in the Algarve in the sixties would have been a recipe for financial wipe-out over the intervening four decades, even at today's prices.
A property bought for £10,000 (converted into escudos) in 1967 and sold for the sterling equivalent of £50,000 at the end of the century would have been worth almost the same in sterling thirtyfive years later. Now factor in inflation, and weep.
I was glad I had not bought property in the Algarve when Ann and I had been wandering around the Iberian peninsular all those years ago, but should I buy now?
There were some interesting properties at cheapo prices, but they were all up in the mountains near Monchique. We had already been up there, and there was a distinct temperature drop, with a heavy covering of clouds, and everywhere was very wet. "It's cooler in the summer," they said, but I wasn't going to live there in the summer. I wanted somewhere for the winters, and I wanted warmth, not cool air and clouds.
I booked a tour of likely properties for the following day and went back to the hotel. From the balcony as it got dark the town began to take on a quaint charm. In the foreground the orange street lamps positively glowed, while further up the hill the white lights of the shops and houses came on, and the searchlights lit up the castle walls and the Christmas crib, until the whole scene looked like a painting by Van Gogh.
In the foreground the oranges glowed from amongst the dark leaves of the trees, and a Mediterranean magic seemed to ooze from the shadows. Up above, a small crescent moon shone with a sharp metallic light, Orion strode up the sky, and Jupiter glowed brightly high in the east.
All in all I felt quite optimistic. That Mediterranean magic has a lot to answer for.
