Ode to Farturas

Ok, so I confess to a love of fried dough, though my thighs might have given the game away ahead of me. Doughnuts and their like are hard to resist so during festival season in Portugal - July and August mainly - I either have to avoid the festivals altogether or give in to the greasy call of the fartura van.

Portugal's farturas are fried dough heaven and they are entertaining too. As a child I loved to watch them being made and judging by the number of kids that crowd round to see them being squirted into a giant spiral out of the giant dough gun into the waiting hot oil they still have some hold over youthful imagination. They, like me all those years ago, secretly want to be the fartura maker and get to wield that gun.

Mostly these treats are sold at festivals or markets in the Summer months but you occasionally see fartura vans in some unlikely places like outside DIY shops or supermarkets in mid-winter. They are so hot and toasty though that despite my feeling that they are out of place I can still feel tehir tractor beam dragging me

Sunsets over the sea...

When I was little I thought that the sun always set over the sea. Then I took a trip to Brazil where the natural thing to happen is for the sun to set behind you while you're looking out towards a dark sky hanging above the ocean. It was sad to watch the sun disappear into the landscape and especially tragic when it ducked prematurely behind a mountaintop.

In Portugal - except perhaps for some places on the southern coast of the Algarve - the default setting for sunsets is over the sea. It is a quirk of geography for a country that faces West along almost the entirety of its coast.This makes for absolutely spectacular sunsets that glimmer and glint in the water and in the height of summer you get to watch a fiery sun extinguish itself in a rainbow sea.

It is a wonder of the Portuguese natural world and it costs nothing at all.