I can’t say the last two days have been action packed or particularly energetic, except Sarah has of course done her obligatory 10,000 steps each day, but it has been a beautifully relaxing break in the countryside.

As I mentioned in my last post, Camping Sera de Bica is virtually in the middle of nowhere. Whichever way you walk out of the campsite you wander onto farm tracks and footpaths and the only people you ever see are other campers.

We are a little puzzled as to how, if at all, the land owners make any money out of this vast area. Nowhere seems to be cultivated and the only livestock we’ve seen have been a handful of goats and sheep in the nearest village. There are cork oaks sparsely scattered around the landscape, but these don’t seem to be the sort of commercial cork oak plantations that we have seen elsewhere.

Yesterday Sarah took Mable on an early morning river walk, the route of which the campsite owner had vaguely described to me. Unfortunately Sarah went the wrong way round the walk, missed the path at the vital point and ended up wading through water and over rocks in order to reach the campsite.

Today we did the walk correctly and although it was a bit scrambley in places, we and both dogs managed the tricky bits. It was glorious to walk down the river bank in baking sun in mid February! Towards the end of the walk Melek did begin to tire and needed much encouragement to complete it.

Sarah has found our theoretically perfect house, isolated and overlooking the river. Unfortunately friends of the campsite owners have bought it and an architect has drawn up plans for its renovation. It will make a great holiday home but it is really too far away from civilisation for retirement, in my opinion.

I have had my birding lens out, with no real success, although on our walk today we did see a Thekla’s Lark, which can only be seen in Southern Europe. A new one for the list.

We are reluctantly moving on tomorrow, back to exploring towns. I have about seven towns for us to look round in South East Portugal before we cross back into Spain. At least that is the plan.