After a long winter of walking the same sandy roads, by May, I was ready to get out of here for a while. I needed to take a very long walk. I’d heard of the Fisherman’s Trail in Portugal, a network of trails that run along the dune tops and cliffs of Portugal’s rugged Atlantic Coast. Hiking in the Algarve seemed like exactly the thing I needed to shake off the cobwebs and start a new season.
Portugal has long occupied a large space in my imagination. Growing up in Provincetown, where they’ll be hosting the annual Portuguese Festival later this June, almost everyone I knew except my family had some ties back to the country. I knew intimately what it was like on our side of the Atlantic. But what was it like over there?
Once I had everything I needed for the hike—no small feat as my credit card company was so shocked I was buying a 50 L backpack, it canceled the purchase, deciding I was being impersonated—it was time to hit the road.
After the first day, a 20 km hike through sand dunes that reminded me, unfavorably at times, of the parabolic dunes of Truro, I wondered if maybe I was being impersonated. What version of me thought I was a hiker? I was used to walking long distances, sure, but not with a heavy backpack under the unfamiliar, unrelenting sun.
The scenery was so immensely beautiful that I pressed on. I spent 8 days hiking through the Costa Vincentia, a grand natural park that protects the rugged cliffs and beaches from development. It is the last stretch of undeveloped coast in Europe. By the end of each day, I was so exhausted I didn’t care that anywhere from two to seven other people were sleeping in the same hostel bunk room as I was. All day long, there was the sound of the waves; at night, a sea of soft snores.
It was hard to believe this was the same ocean that I knew from home. In Portugal, the water was a brilliant turquoise blue. The Cape and Islands are only twenty-something-thousand years old. Now, I walk walking along stoney cliffs that were more than 300 million years old. This coastline had been formed during the breakup of the supercontinent.
I saw new birds, swifts and storks among them. The swifts are daring acrobats; they sliced though the sky with their scythe-like wings. The storks made their nests in the otherwise inhospitable cliffs. And, here and there, I saw the fishermen for which the trail is named, the amazingly brave people who showed no fear of heights as they scrambled down impossible-seeming narrow trails that led down to the rocks upon which they fished. People who live by the sea, I was reminded again and again, have to be resourceful.
Ahead of the high season, it was great to be a tourist someplace else. Maybe it will help me better navigate the throngs of tourists who are already on their way to us, stuck in traffic on the Bourne and Sagamore bridges. Like me, they are just hoping a change of scenery will be exactly the thing they need.
