Friendly little Évora kept us busy on Valentine’s Day. Thoughtful Quinn somehow made some Valentine’s art for us, kept it hidden from me while I went through every item in her backpack in hopes of getting rid of some weight, brought it to another city, and presented it to us on the morning of Valentine’s Day! You never know what she has up her sleeves!

In the brisk, breezy sunshine we admired the first century Temple of Diana briefly before visiting the Catedral de Évora. We grumble a bit about paying for church entrance, but this cathedral ticket included a rooftop view, the cloisters, a religious art museum, the cathedral itself, and not one, but three commemorative coin machines. Picture a noisy, larger-than-normal family with a bunch of scruffy little kids clustered around said coin machines for ten minutes. Over the kid chatter you can hear the jingle of coins and the occasional clank of a heavy coin hitting metal. Oh wait, and there’s the sound of the crank as one of the machines smashes a nickel into a copper blob with the virgin of something-or-other pressed into it. Yeah, that’s us. My parents can claim full responsibility for funding the commemorative coin shopping spree with their donations.

We visited the pretty little Pastelaria Violeta for a Valentine’s Day treat: chocolate-dipped cookies tasting faintly of orange and some sort of glazed pastry dough confection that I don’t know the name of. Packaged in a cute little box, they were devoured immediately.

We’ve seen and sampled various sweets all over Europe. Portugal’s sweets perhaps haven’t been the absolute best, but they are decent quality and widely available. Aside from the numerous charming little independent bakeries, almost every grocery store has a bakery section with cases of various types of fresh bread and baked treats. We have sampled croissants, chocolate croissants, cream-filled croissants, chocolate muffins, cookies, the national favorite pastel de nata (like a little cream custard tart), brioche rolls, cheese puffs, and many varieties of bread. I’m not big on carbs, but when in Portugal, you can’t avoid them! To purchase baked goods, you select what you want from the cases and package it yourself. Sometimes you print your own label, and you can often use a bread slicing machine to cut your loaf as desired. The bakery cases are almost always the busiest section of the grocery store, and we can understand why. You will see anyone from old ladies to groups of teenagers to workmen buzzing around the cases to choose their daily treat. Everything is so fresh, and the irregular shape of the bread loaves shows that they are being formed from fresh dough by human hands.

We left Évora to drive south to spend our last few days in Portugal in Vale do Lobo, an extensive golf resort community. Walking around the orderly neighborhoods inhabited at the moment by mostly British or northern European expats/tourists, the atmosphere feels quite different from other parts of Portugal. We’ve seen lots of signage with Portuguese as the second language, preceded by English, and then followed by German and French at times. The weather feels like Newport Beach, but add some heat, and it could be Central Florida. In any case, we have enjoyed walking down to the beach and finding endless treasures.

Portugal put on a show with delightfully perfect weather for our last few days. With cool breezes, gentle sunshine, and amazing scenery, we can see why so many people come to this area for winter or forever. We’ve eaten dinner outside, left doors open all day, dried laundry on the rooftop terrace in the sun, and been comfortable in shorts and sweatshirts. And I guarantee we can appreciate it all the more after the weeks of stormy weather.

We leave tomorrow morning for the United Kingdom! We are eager to be in an English-speaking country but will definitely miss many things about Portugal – more on that in another post!