Viva La Vita

The folks in Alvor are happy to see people. They smile and mean it. Most locals we have encountered speak very good English. They seem to appreciate our efforts to speak Portuguese. After a sentence of my Southern English, the locals are quite surprised when I end with: obrigada (female version of thank you; males say Obrigado) as we leave. They give a big smile and return the Portuguese thank you. We do speak a few words or phrases of Portuguese thanks to our Language translator app.—Obrigada Elise!

We had a fun day laughing at ourselves over some miscommunication of language. We walked over 6 miles today around the village. We had a great lunch at an Italian restaurant named: Pepperino. Once again, the food was amazing! We had a great dinner at “home” catered by Mary’s Bar and Hardware (some will understand this…HaHaHa). It was delicious!

Our evening entertainment is Ice Hockey (NHL) highlights on YouTube. Our VRBO TV has 6 stations and they all are in Portuguese. Which is ok!! When in Portugal…

The BEST chocolate/white chocolate mousse EVER! We split this.

No big agenda today. Started with coffee and some excursion planning (more about that on the day of excursions). We walked into the village at the marina. Talked with our favorite tour person, and made some potential plans that need to wait for weather reports after Seville, Spain trip.

We stopped for lunch on the waterfront at Ababuja. Had a very nice lunch. Great food and great service!

Mary finally found a hat she liked and purchased. We walked the marina waterfront, had an Aperol spritzer on a rooftop bar, and caught a brilliant sunset. It has been a wonderful day in ALVOR.

Plastic bottle waste collection

After coffee, we planned a 3 day trip to Seville, Spain for next week. We have the bus booked for a round trip and a reservation for a double studio apartment in Old Town.

We walked on the ALVOR boardwalk down to the cliffs (Praia dos Tres Irmaos) at the beach. It’s a beautiful beach area. We plan to go back and sit on the beach there when the weather is more favorable.

The weather during the day has been windy and showers for 15 minutes, then sunny since we arrived. The temperatures during the day have been in the 60’s (F).

We made a stop at Intermarche market to restock on a few groceries and purchase dinner. We have a great view of the ocean from our apartment, so it was nice to have dinner “at home” and check out the view!

And wow!! As I was writing this, we had another rain shower. The sun was out as well and voila; another rainbow!!

The oranges grown in the Algarve are the BEST friggin oranges I’ve EVER eaten in my life! I love fruit! We both have eaten 1 every day. Mary is not a fruit lover—so they’ve gotta be good.

Today is Mary’s birthday!

Our day started out with a water taxi ride from Alvor to the Lagos Marina. It took about 15 minutes to get to Lagos. We explored the marina and walked over the footbridge into the city. The city was busy (Holy Week), the weather was beautiful, and we were ready to explore. We had a very nice lunch at “The Sanctuary” restaurant. Mary had Sea bass and I had beef stroganoff. The food was delicious.

We took an UBER to visit our friend Elise. She took us to the cliffs, Ponta da Piedade. The views were breathtaking! We plan to hike part of the Fisherman’s Trail that follows along the cliffs at some point (TBD). We went to the beach at the cliffs. We had a nice adult beverage and finally got some pictures of us together. Elise has graciously shared a lot of knowledge about Portugal and travel throughout Europe. We had a wonderful visit with Elise.

Mary and I came back to Alvor for the evening. We headed for one of our favorite restaurants in the village, ALBAR. We had dessert to honor Mary’s birthday! The desserts were delicious and I would say Mary had quite a full day of birthday celebration.

The water taxi awaits.

Our water taxi captain and crew.

Lagos Marina

The market

(Beautiful day in Alvor)

We had a relaxing morning to start this beautiful day. Then we ventured out to locate pizza for lunch. We got a recommendation from a local store clerk we’ve chatted with before. had a delicious pepperoni, mushroom and garlic pizza at Pastelaria Suica. The crust was thin and amazing!

We went to the beach briefly with hopes to hang out, but it was very windy and cool. We stayed to capture a few pictures. Went back into the village (the locals say they are a village not a city) for some browsing. Pull The Bar was our next stop where we tried an Aperol Spritzer. It was quite tasty. Pull the Bar is associated with the Alvor Kite Center where they teach kite surfing lessons (in the US we refer to this sport as kite boarding).

Pulling the Imaginary bar…if this were 20 years ago, I’d be taking lessons! LOL!

We had some morning rain, but from 11:15am onward, it was a gorgeous and windy day.We woke up to a rainbow. It was beautiful and for a while there was a reflection where it appeared as 2 rainbows.

We walked the western half of the Alvor boardwalk today. We walked 3.81 miles on the boardwalk plus a few miles in the city. We saw windmills, kite boarders, and a lot of boats. We had a late lunch at Casa da Mare located on the Alvor waterfront. Mary enjoyed Sardinha Pate and a Monk fish shish kabob. I (not a seafood fan) had a grilled steak with peppercorns, mixed veggies and a salad. We both enjoyed our meals. And lastly we had some pistachio gelato…YUM.

Last but not least, we also stopped at our favorite local small market. Purchased 4 Pastel de Nata. Per our friend Elise, they are delicious. We plan to have them with Portuguese coffee tomorrow morning.

We are hoping all the miles we walked today has offset the meal we had out.

Lagos (above)

We did go to the market and around the city. ALVOR had off and on rain showers for most of the day. These showers caused a couple of “let’s look in this store moments”. The store owners welcomed folks in out of the rain and appeared to not mind if you were just getting out of the rain—very kind people.

Alvor is a quaint town with friendly people all around. Activity has picked up the past couple of days…possibly due to Holy Week.

Our friends, Elise and Kevin came by to see us. We were very excited to see them. We had a nice visit and an adult beverage at a local beach front restaurant. Elise and Kevin brought us some giant lemons from their hike today. With regret, we missed taking a photo of the 4 of us.

The local lemons pictured below are as big as the local oranges we purchased today. I think we may make some lemonade! The oranges are the beat I have ever tasted!

Lemon tree at a residence in ALVOR.

We walked the ALVOR boardwalk today, explored the city, ate more delicious food and drank some unbelievably good Sangria (at RESTAURANTE 5 QUINAS off the boardwalk). Late afternoon we had some Almond and Fig gelato (yummy!). Last but not least; we saw a nice sunset and a moon rise from our VRBO patio. Below are a few pictures from our day.

Not sure why we have not come to Portugal before now…

Our flight landed around 10:25 am (Portugal Time, 6:26am EST)on April 12, 2025. Had a delay getting to the gate as we arrived about 20 min early and the plane before us had not departed yet..
Then we were off to customs, bag claim, and money exchange. All went relatively well.
Next on the agenda was securing an UBER to take us to the Bus station. Not knowing how long any of those airport activities would take I scheduled us on a 2:45pm bus…bad move. Ended up waiting 2 hrs for our bus.
Finally we were headed to the southern coast of Portugal. We arrived in Alvor around 6:00pm, met our VRBO host and unpacked.
We then walked into ALVOR looking for a good meal. We decided to try RESTAURANTE ALBAR and were not disappointed!

Headed back to the VRBO as we were exhausted. Hence, the day late post about our arrival.

Last picture is our VRBO patio view.

We are in Raleigh this evening. Our flight from RDU to BOS was rescheduled such that we could not make our connecting flight in BOS to Portugal. All is not lost: had a nice dinner and visited with family.

We were rebooked to leave tomorrow morning, hang out for a bit in the BOS airport, then onward to Portugal. Gotta ROLL WITH IT!