Эпизоды
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Today I’d like to start with an apology.
You’ve been very patient with me as I’ve bumbled and grumbled my way through the past few months, mostly moaning about DIY, crossing the Valley of Death, Losing Perspective and treating my despatches more like therapy sessions.
You didn’t sign up to be armchair psychiatrists, so I’m sorry...but thank you.
After a bit of self-reflection and a little “enough already” advice from people whose opinions I trust, I would like to announce the official end to my searing negativity.
I’ve been leaning this way for a little while, but a piece of important news this week has lifted a heavy weight from our shoulders.
Like the magical morning mists that sometimes shroud our valley, the doom and gloom has been steadily lifting – burning off to reveal the blue skies.
And of course they were always there – I just couldn’t see them.
But now it’s time to stop looking down at overwhelming to-do lists and obsessing with the small things, and to look up and see the big picture – the picture we fell in love with when we first came to this valley.
And it’s also time to stop looking backwards, but looking forwards to the next step in our career transition through builders to proprietors.
Our friends and VIPs (Very Inspiring Proprietors) Vera and Cam went through a similar construction project and have quickly grown a really successful tourism and retreat business up the road at Quinta Camarena in nearby Cercal.
“Oh, the building work,” Vera told us, “I remember that – it sucked,” she said...just six months after their hugely stressful race to get everything finished.
Of course the pressure has mostly, but not entirely, been self-inflicted.
Years in journalism have left me obsessed with deadlines and the desire to throw myself into something, get it mastered, get the story told, and move onto the next thing.
But of course not everything works like that.
Since the building work began a little over two years ago we’ve had a singular aim in mind: to get the lodge finished and open to paying guests this summer.
A year ago we were confident that we’d be ready by May, and even after the winter rain we still thought June was do-able, while the builders, engineers and every artisan in earshot said: “what, you’re planning to open this year?”
“August for sure” we told ourselves, each other and anyone else who’d listen.
But it wasn’t just a hope – it was a need.
We’ve taken a big loan to do this project, and although most of it is zero interest courtesy of the tourism authority – to promote growth in remote and traditionally poorer parts of the country – it still needs to be paid back...in just 10 years.
The capital repayments were due to start next month – just in time for the winter tourism lull – but thanks to our bank manager’s confidence in our project and lobbying on our behalf, Turismo de Portugal have agreed to postpone payments.
We don’t yet know for how long, and this certainly doesn’t mean we can rest on our laurels (or the succulents we are busily planting), but it gives us a bit of breathing space.
In a few short weeks, even the dreaded DIY has been transformed into a series of “craft projects” and thinking about it that way has completely changed my approach.
I’m not sure why it all became so overwhelming, but I’ve done a full 180 and have started really enjoying tinkering with some wood, creating a couple of coffee tables and pondering how to turn railway sleeper screws into coat hooks.
Thanks to both Niels and Ola for their advice on proposing a solution to attach the heavy metalwork into the wall.
I’ve had so much encouragement and advice from my crowd-sourced therapy – thank you one and all – but as I sat down to write this despatch, Bernard from beautiful Marvão up in the Alentejo hills, made some time between his own DIY projects to send me a note:
“DIY is a skilled undertaking and like gardening requires a lot of attention and organisation and you get better and faster at it. In rural Portugal it's there for life,” Bernard noted with a smiley-face.
He put my moaning into perspective – remembering a time before my mate Leroy (as in Leroy Merlin, the French B&Q/Home Depot) had even made it to Portugal...and how much harder it was to find the things needed to do the job back then.
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“DIY is underrated, regarded as trivial, especially in Britain, so you may think it's a frustrating waste of time, especially when in competition with seemingly serious tasks like getting stuff through the [town hall].”
Well that process does continue – we’re still wating for our licenses, but each we we get (hopefully) a step closer.
My decision to embrace “craft projects” began with two planks of our fallen cork oak tree, some epoxy resin, an electric sander and a pot of varnish.
Rather than rushing to finish and move on to the next job I did a little every day – filling in the cracked wood, carefully rounding it off and sanding it smooth and I now have two beautiful benches for the mezzanines for guests to drink at or to work over.
The next job is only harrowing because it involves two old Portuguese wrought iron ploughing harrows which need feet and a glass top to become coffee tables.
I can’t wait to get stuck into the wine label project, and my new relationship with wood makes The Clubhouse bookshelves sound like an adventure.
But the clearing mists have also made me realise we’re coming to summer a little late this year.
The whole point of this crazy adventure was to design our lives so we could live here – in the beautiful Portuguese countryside with our amazing views and the wild beaches and golden sands just a short drive away.
We love the fresh fish – I’ve spent a long time perfecting my grilled fish, butterflied and braai-ed – and we’ve not been to our favourite seafood restaurant in a while.
We haven’t even dropped by the Crabstraunt (as Oda calls it), or tried wine at our local Vicentino winery’s beautiful new tasting room
Part of that is due to what our friends in the Algarve Richard & Pauline call the “Agostinis” – the tourists who rock up with their outsider demands every August (but also perhaps could be the name of a noble and serious new martini cocktail).
The beaches are already starting to thin out, the ocean water is warming and our summer sidles onwards while everyone else goes back to the office.
We have managed to sneak out to the beach once or twice for planning meetings, and the occasional working lunch picnic.
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Alongside the ongoing craft project, our office currently includes Ana’s series of rockeries under construction, experiments with LPWAN technology for monitoring and automating our water supply, and gradually getting everything ready for a photoshoot for our website.
The pressure over opening may have been released a little, but we still need to make some money – attract some late summer visitors and try and run our first retreat.
Our villa will be toasty all winter thanks to the underfloor heating and my mind is already wandering into water collection for when rain eventually drops by.
In the last couple of weeks I had another countering-disinformation trip to Nairobi (we now officially have enough Maasai blankets to keep a full house of guests nice and warm in the evenings), and I’ve just finished narrating our friend Joanna's book for Audible...it was the first one I’ve done and it was tougher than I expected!
It’s an amazing book for western CEOs though – Chinafy by Joanna Hutchins: Why China is Leading the West in Innovation and How the Rest of the World can Catch Up.
Once the audio book goes live I’ll post a link, but it is a brilliant insider’s account of just why China’s economy will soon be top of the world.
I’m not sure our little business is going to change the world, but it’s certainly changing our world, and with the challenges, the things we’re learning to do...and about ourselves...it’s certainly change for the better.
Especially now we’ve emerged from our summer of stress, newly invigorated to take on the bureaucracy battles which will allow us to open, and with a nice number of craft projects to work away at.
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit alastairleithead.substack.com -
With all the talk about gender at the Olympics I’ve been reassessing how I identify.
I’ve spent the last few years trying to move towards something approaching the Oxford English dictionary’s definition of handyman: “a person able or employed to do occasional domestic repairs and minor renovations.”
I’ve slowly being moving towards the “Mr Fixit” label my mum used to have for my dad when I was growing up – I’m actually still using some of his tools from the 1950s box with his initials on it.
But my attitude towards our project recently is making me reconsider.
Now I think I identify as “unhandy man” or a “Mr Fixit-NOT”
I am so totally done with D-I-Why. I’m so over it. I don’t want to Do It Myself anymore. I’d like someone else to do it.
Hours spent trying to work out how to do stuff has allowed me to ponder the alternative meanings of this TLA (Three Letter Acronym):
* Died Inside Yesterday
* Dammit. Idiot. You!
* Done? Isn’t Yet.
* Drilling Incomplete. Yawn.
* Daily Incompetence? Yes.
* Don’t I Yearn...to do something else? Darn It, Yes.
Hopefully this is just a passing phase...given the amount of tinkering time, drill-skills and general knowledge about our solar and water systems I am going to need to keep this show on the road.
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But right now I really can’t face putting up any more lights, filling the remaining gaps between the skirting boards and the wall, or faffing about with wood and hinges.
I’ve thrown everything at a long running battle with the kitchen sink, hopefully have found the final solution to a leaking industrial dishwasher, and we have secured all the headboards.
But then there are the coffee tables and the wooden benches to make and varnish and fit and finish....
I make almost daily trips to the nearby agricultural supplies store and the hardware place because I haven’t bought enough nails or the right sized pipe or the correct tap.
But a lot of what we need involves a day trip.
The local DIY superstore down in the Algarve is Leroy Merlin – pronounced in Portuguese with an odd fake French accent: Leh-roh-ah Mare-lahn.
But I’m now comfortable just calling him Leroy – not even Senhor Merlin, or O Leroy – we’ve spent so much time together we are definitely on first-name terms and converse in the tu form.
I almost know what all the different silicones are for, what kind of paint you use on what and where everything is in most stores.
I even felt let down when one of his people refused to let me buy an air conditioning unit for the adega (wine cellar) because I didn’t have the name, licence number, date of birth, mother’s maiden name and inside leg measurement of the person who was going to install it.
It’s the law apparently...presumably thanks to a well-connected and strongly lobbying AC Fitters’ Union (perhaps known as the “AC-FU”?).
The car happily drives itself the hour and a quarter cross-country to visit the Holy Trinity of IKEA, Leroy and Makro.
I’ve overdosed on Swedish meatballs and hotdogs and burned hours pondering different sized parafusos (screws...up there on my list of favourite Portuguese words with rodapé or skirting boards...why use two words when you can do it in one?).
We’ve bought so many flat-pack things which need assembling, that we have spent hours just putting waste cardboard into recycling bins.
The annoying thing is that after all this I am still rubbish at it.
Lists of things to “just finish off” take hours – many of which are spent walking from one building to another searching for missing tools or drill bits which I’m sure I left somewhere.
The place is looking great – and every day it gets a little closer to being “finished” – a technical definition indicating “the placement of essentials allowing the rooms to be habitable” while other things are gradually added and finessed over time.
Of course to be officially habitable we need a licence...and little happens here once you hit August.
Businesses close, people head off on holiday and the town hall kicks the can down the road by asking for some additional signed piece of paper which we were categorically told by our architect we didn’t need a month ago.
Endless regulations, high taxes and several six-month long delays – which have twice been resolved with the official response of “oh, I forgot” – have left us financially and emotionally drained.
Both the town hall and key professionals have been unresponsive for months throughout this process. The lack of accountability from all sides is far more exhausting than we could have imagined.
Ho-hum. Let’s just hope the tourism authority are generous when they read the letter our bank manager sent on our behalf asking if we could put off payment of the loan capital until we are actually allowed to open.
We were hoping to make money this summer to get us through the more fallow winter months so are hoping to put off repayments until next Easter when tourism picks up again.
After all, compared to others in the area we’ve done things very quickly for Alentejo, but so very frustrating to spend so much time and effort to do things above board, when many people here take the approach of asking for forgiveness rather than permission. It’s often faster and cheaper.
Friends and visitors are generous with their praise for what we’ve achieved in the four years since we arrived here in the Valley of the Stars.
That’s quite an important number for me, because for all the years spent bouncing from country to country I have never lived in one place for more than four years since the 1980s when I left school in Newcastle.
Breaking an adult-lifelong nomadic habit hasn’t been as hard as I might have thought, probably because we’re so busy I suppose.
But I am happily settled in the place where we have settled and am looking forward to the next four, by which time I hope we will be running a successful business...ie one that brings in more money than it spends (very much against the current trend).
A thousand boxes of linen arrived the other day, the cutlery is on the way, you can never have too many vacuum cleaners and Ana hitched a lift north with our generous neighbour Daniel to order the crockery which we picked up a day later (at 6am) at one of the monthly markets in the area.
We’ve had a few friends road testing the facilities this weekend and while we grabbed a bit of downtime.
Ed, Rachael & Daisy were back for a week...officially our best return guests (we think it’s nine trips so far); Tim & Trish came with a camera...but we aren’t quite ready for the glamour shots just yet.
Their water was cold – but that’s just because I forgot to turn on the heatpumps – and it smelt a bit plastic-y, so I need to run a lot of water through the system.
But the pool was “amazing” and the clubhouse has the seal of approval as a great place to hang out.
And we had the first visit of our sommelier/acrobat/dancer neighbour Candace and her husband Geoff, who arrived generously armed with some wonderful wines for us to throw into the mix for a lovely wine tasting dinner with endless views over the hills.
For those of you wondering, yes the wine podcast has been on hiatus in lieu of all the other stuff we’re trying to do...but the next episode is almost finished and is coming soon. If you haven’t heard the first half of the season check it out:
I just keep remembering things and panicking about not getting them done...the LED lights in the bathrooms!...the website!...the fan system for the adega...the woodwork!
We have achieved a huge amount against the odds: out lack of experience of building, of Portuguese bureaucracy, of knowing how to do things...but we are so nearly there.
While the place will never be finished, it will be nice to be able to have time to think again...and to plan the vineyard, the marketing, the retreats...and learn how to run a lodge.
But for now, I suppose I need to haul myself up the hill, try to gather all the possible tools I could need today into one shopping bag and try to spend more time doing it myself than looking for missing tools myself.
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Пропущенные эпизоды?
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“Well, now you just need to get through the valley of death, don’t you?” was the unexpected message of encouragement from one of our recent guests.
I met Professor Eric Lambin at Stanford University in northern California where Ana and I spent a fabulous (albeit COVID-interrupted) back-to-school journalism fellowship year.
He might be a world-renowned geographer, a member of the European Commission’s Group of Chief Scientific Advisors and a Blue Planet Prizewinner, but he was also one of the three students rocking up for beginning Portuguese classes every weekday morning.
All of us wanted to learn European Portuguese, but with more than 200 million Brazilians out there, that wasn’t an option and so we were learning to say the word city (cidade) with a swagger as “sid-AD-gee” rather than “sid-ad” and speaking virtually “shush”-free.
There’s quite a difference between the two versions of Portuguese and every evening Ana would make me rewrite all the verb tables adding the “tu” form (second person pronoun) which is largely ignored in Brazil, where você is favoured for everything.
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And the letter S is often pronounced as a “shh” in Portugal at the end of a word or before a consonant – it’s why it sometimes sounds like Russian...and while the Portuguese can understand spoken Spanish it doesn’t work the other way around.
You’ll get a better idea if you listen to the audio version of this despatch, but here’s an attempt to explain what I mean through a few words and a Portuguese tongue-twister:
Three plates of wheat for three sad tigers (Três pratos de trigo para três tristes tigres) is pronounced Tresh prAT-osh duh TREE-go pah-ra tresh trish-tesh tig-resh)
Festa meaning party is pronounced FESH-tah
Ratos meaning mice is pronounced RAT-oosh
Oh, and hashish is spelt haxixe!
But I digress...
Eric’s disturbing talk about death in the Valley of the Stars was taken from his knowledge of Silicon Valley and a pattern which leads many startup companies to fail.
As a geographer myself, graphs and maps always help illustrate a point, but Investopedia describes “the Death Valley Curve” as “the span of time from the moment [a company] receives its initial capital contribution until it finally begins generating revenue.”
In other words having spent almost all our money we need to keep going and finish everything until we officially open and guests start providing us with income to pay our costs and pay off our loan.
Now, I know this is not world-changing tech we’re developing: we’re not trying to train drones to swarm, or reinvent The Facebook (interestingly pronounced FacEY BOOK-ee in Brazilian), we’re just trying to build a few houses to rent out.
As regular readers know, there’s a bit more to it than that – building a totally solar-driven off-the-grid eco-luxe lodge is very challenging – although the only world we’ll be changing if we don’t make it through death valley is our own, but you know what I mean.
We’re nibbling away at the to-do list a bit slower than we’d hoped, but every little thing left to do by the builders needs to be done by us...and there are still a lot of projects.
Connecting the new Starlink to our ethernet network was a nightmare – I mean have you ever tried to wire up a fiddly little ethernet plug? Madness. Is it A, is it B...there must be an easier way of doing it?
Skirting boards remain un-fitted and un-sealed, headboards aren’t putting themselves up and the remaining furniture is slowly being assembled.
Next is to rename our buildings in a snappier way. For two years we’ve been using the arbitrarily labelled names from the architectural project: E, F and G.
Building E is the “main building” or the “pool house,” F is the villa and G is the row of en suite rooms. Maybe we need to name them after wine grapes...or stars...hmm.
Senhor Manuel the builder returned for a final run through of what still needs to be finished or tweaked and he brought an unusual warm glow and broad smile on his face...which could be either relief or perhaps pride?
After nearly two years he’s transformed this hilltop from a tatty, overgrown eucalyptus plantation into a stunning tourist lodge...and the only big part of the job left to finish now lies with the electrician who hasn’t been well.
What’s the problem with the occasional live wire sticking out here and there?
Hopefully he’s feeling better and will be back this week.
We’ve been helped hugely by the surges of activity provided by visiting skilled friends, and hosting our first sardine and wine dinner at our main building gave us a real boost.
Our Portuguese winemaking friends Mauro and Rita stayed with their kids for a few days, road testing the pool and bringing a small lake of their own wine and some much needed help and advice.
They make amazing wines and are just starting on a similar tourism project in Cuba, Alentejo which claims to be the original Cuba.
They’re naturally putting natural wine at the heart of that project and I’ve written about them in a previous wine blog – it’s in the Vidigueira region famous for Alentejo white wines and talha or amphora wine made the way the Romans made it.
They’ve put us in touch with someone who might help us navigate these last crucial stages of the project, and have proposed a little arrangement that will allow us to have our own house wine this year...watch this space.
Ana’s old pal Joanna is the third person we’ve lured to buy a house in this still-undiscovered part of Portugal, and she was here to get to grips with what needs to be done to the new place.
She has a Wine and Spirit Educational Trust (WSET) diploma in wine as well working in Greenland (I mean how cool is that...quite cool apparently...well actually pretty chilly, but stunning)...and so we’re trying to persuade her to run wine training courses at Vale das Estrelas.
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Her partner Paul also arrived from Shanghai to take a first look.
Paul’s very handy. As well as working on their place he spent some time helping us out, creating an amazing storage space and daybed headboard for one of the mezzanines (in just one day), and helping bring an added bit of Irishness to some sports watching.
He could have been slightly more sensitive during the final of the Euros, but did put in some hanging lights above the bar while Ireland beat South Africa in the rugby and stepped in with a drill when the new braai inexplicably needed installing.
It was chaos in the kitchen as Mauro and I tried to fit the taps and U-bend before people arrived (ultimately unsuccessfully) and it took an age for the coals to fire up.
But with the pink sky of a sunset over the valley, a mountain of sardines sizzling on the table, and with Mauro and Swiss winemaker friend Niels’ wines flowing we began to realise that we really have created something special.
This was just the first of many fun-filled al fresco evenings of wine and stories ending under a dark sky crammed with stars and the Milky Way flowing across the valley.
It was a great reminder of that first night here when we decided on the name Vale das Estrelas, or Valley of the Stars.
Maybe we’ve climbed up the steepest side of the valley of death, or maybe it’s a false summit...but as I never used say at the end of a BBC report (because it’s a terrible cliché) “only time will tell.”
We’ve decided that encouraging people to visit with a lure of a package, or some form of retreat is the best way forward.
Prof Eric may have scared us a little using the phrase “Valley of Death” in the Valley of the Stars, but he and his wife Régine also greatly inspired us with their project in central Portugal.
They bought an estate house, spent a few years doing it up beautifully and now run a successful business at Qunita da Marmela and run cultural tours and horse-tours...packages of things to do...reinforcing our idea this is a good way forward.
They wanted to hike some stretches of the Rota Vicentina long distance trail and loved it – despite the summer heat.
Rather than walking to a new guesthouse each day, they used our place as a base and balanced time on the clifftops and beaches with the pool and the serenity of our countryside.
“This could easily be a five day package,” they agreed.
So there’s the first idea...then there’s the wine...and perhaps a painting retreat...and something involving exploring Europe’s last wild coast.
* And if you have any ideas about “content” to fill a week while enjoying an undiscovered part of Portugal - or experience of leading retreats - and would like to explore a collaboration...do let us know!
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit alastairleithead.substack.com -
I’m sitting on a plane in the skies over Africa trying to put everything we’re doing into perspective.
It’s silly o’clock in the morning here, but recently we’ve been no strangers to sleepless nights, recurring dreams about buried pipes bursting and cold sweats over finances and licencing.
Big things are happening in the valley, but they’ve been wearing us down.
I lost perspective last week on one of the most difficult days on this crazy journey so far.
Another no-show from our architect and another week-long delay was the final shove towards the realisation we weren’t going to be fully open this year.
There have been many challenges, pressured decisions and self-reflections on whether we would ever have started this madcap scheme if we knew how it would unfold.
Now there are even deeper doubts about what we can do before the debts are called in and expenditure starts to spiral above the lower autumn and winter income.
But landing on a sunny June evening in Amsterdam after a short hop from Lisbon, traversing the chaotic airport terminals and now sitting here in the dark, wedged between the two other biggest blokes on a flight to Nairobi, I hope some of that perspective is returning.
At the very least it’s giving me some quiet reflective time to think about what we’ve done, how far we’ve come and what we’ve still got left to do.
The workload has been relentless – my precious early morning thinking hours to get podcast episodes published and blogs written have been cut short before 8am when workers and machines arrive and the firefighting begins.
The days are long and we have been using the light and the time; bedtimes are early, but bodies are sore and minds are busy.
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Planning...we try...there are pages of re-written and slightly updated to-do lists in notebooks, but something always comes along like a water leak or an unexpected artisan to throw a spanner in the works.
Extra screws for the patio covers, materials to order, emergency trips for vital components...more things to do than we have time for in a day or even to get through in a week.
I’m good at the firefighting, but not so good at the big picture; I push things through by force of will, but don’t properly prioritise; I immerse myself in the technical details, but am overwhelmed when faced with an onslaught of competing demands.
Thank goodness Ana is better at that...if only she could have more space to do it.
Ana deals with all the angry conversations in Portuguese and the old-school mansplainers, and has to manage the pressure of me pushing demands to the brink of destruction.
It really is one of the most difficult and stressful things we have ever done, but the hardest part is all the things that are out of our control.
And the process of licensing – the town hall bureaucracy – is certainly out of our control.
Our architect has been absent for long periods and different people are telling us many different things about how a changing process works – what we need and what we don’t need.
Expensive acoustic inspections, energy certificates that could take a year, six months or just a couple of weeks...depending on who you ask.
We pushed hard for our final architecture project to be submitted, but it wasn’t accurately done. Now it needs to be withdrawn and then re-submitted.
The topographic survey was done quickly to keep us ahead, but now we’re told our recent spurt of landscaping also needs to be marked on the map and the survey needs to be redone
We’ve done some extreme gardening before, but the last couple of weeks has been all about landscaping – cleaning up after the builders, levelling the land and putting in a few degrees of slope here and there so rainwater flows between the houses and down into the valley.
We know water lingers in the clay at the top of our valley, and as soon as the soil is saturated, any little indentation can become a lake.
Hopefully it will be managed by the long drainage trench cut between the future vineyard and the houses, and the new roadside ditch filled with drain pipes and gravel.
We bought many cubic metres of material – carefully calculating the cost of different colours and qualities to try and stay within our trimmed budget.
With the builders’ cabins gone the area in need of prettification required before welcoming guests, was a lot larger than we expected: hundreds of square metres.
Thankfully we had Helder from the material supplies and plant hire place up the road – he smooths and levels piles of gravel using the tractor buckets like extensions of his own hands, flicking here, patting down earth there.
The list of things left to do is overwhelming, but with Alan & Margery Gledson staying again we got the final building’s concrete floors sealed and all the wooden bathroom sink tops and bowls installed.
The marble kitchen tops arrived – they’re beautiful – and slowly but surely the electrics, the metal safety railings and the water system are being completed.
The beds will be the last things to go in...once the workman boots have moved on.
Even a beautiful Portuguese paradise can become a millstone of pressure and worry.
But retuning to Africa, meeting some Ethiopian journalists who live their lives in fear of the police knocking on their door in the night, helps bring some perspective.
I’ve been doing some work on the side countering disinformation and that’s what brings me to Nairobi – our old home – for the first time in five years.
A vast concrete overpass – the lauded Expressway – now flies above the city.
It took just a few years to build...a little more than our lodge which pales in scale.
High-rise buildings have sprung up, development is everywhere...but so is protest – five years on, different voices are now being silenced by the same water cannon, riot police and teargas that were so familiar I owned a gas mask.
These are the voices of the youth facing down a tumult of new taxes.
Maybe it’s time for me to mix the morning classical music listening with a little more news again, to read those Economists, to re-engage in that big world beyond the valley.
There are books waiting to be read, there are beaches ready to be visited, there’s calm to be restored and chaos to be tamed.
Balance needs to come back into our lives – we need to be running this, and not letting it run (or ruin) us.
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It’s time for a reset, a plan, a strategy...to be ready for guests as soon as we can and to get ourselves rested and ready for them
After all, this is just the beginning of something that will never be finished, but will just get better and better.
Spread the word, help us get this soft-opening year off to a good start.
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit alastairleithead.substack.com -
In the end they left with a whimper rather than a bang.
Almost un-noticed, things on the building site gradually started disappearing until suddenly there was nothing left – except for a large pile of building rubbish and some unfinished digging work.
We’d agreed to pay for some of Justo’s digger time by the hour, and just as I was stressing about which work we needed him to do in what order he started loading it on the back of the truck.
“Broken” he shrugged and headed off to the mechanic.
He came back with an empty truck and as if by magic the last builders’ cabin disappeared. We haven’t seen them since.
I suppose that’s when we realised it was up to us now, and that all the things that still needed to be done...need to be done by us.
And there’s quite a long list.
The gradual departure of the builders passed us by because we were just so busy.
Cleaning the land with a strimmer within 50m of every building needed to be done by the end of May, and having prioritised other things I found myself facing quite an uphill (and downhill, and uphill, and downhill again) task.
With huge thanks to volunteer helpers John Rourke and Hugh Jennings who took some good chunks out of the work, I have been rising at dawn to get out on the land before the heat really hits.
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(Although I wonder if there’s a connection between John’s Scottish roots and the propensity of remaining thistles? I do hope you’re recovering well John!).
Summer has arrived and strimming after 11am quickly becomes a very energy-sapping endeavour when there’s so much else to do after the work out.
Weed-whacking might be a great weight-loss programme, but it steals my thinking and writing time.
This is the longest I’ve left between delivering despatches from Vale das Estrelas since I began, and the early morning exercise along with the bi-weekly podcast episodes have nipped my creativity.
By the way, if you haven’t started listening to the podcast yet please go over to our other Substack page – or search on Spotify or Apple Podcasts for Ana & Al’s Big Portuguese Wine Adventure. We’re up to Episode 5 already!
Help us, part 1…
The first way you can help us is to rate the podcast and leave us a review to get the algorithm working for us…and getting more people listening.
The other big deadline was saving the lives of our 250 olive trees, scattered citrus and newly planted rosemary and lavender bushes in front of the new houses.
They were all starting to seriously sag and even though we started the process of replacing a broken irrigation pump early it was a close call.
We decided to install a submersible pump in the lake to provide all the irrigation water for now – until we have a full house at the lodge and the waste treatment plant starts providing us with ample nutritious agua.
The brilliant Cristiano and his brother Eduardo built an island out of an old pallet and four second-hand blue barrels bought for the occasion, but sadly the island sank and we had to switch it for a bright orange buoy.
The guys laid out the 300m of pipes in the blink of an eye, because they are experts in what is an undervalued, but hugely valuable skill.
Then the thief of time became the drippers.
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You can buy ready-to-install systems with a connector to the main pipe, a tube and then a spiked dripper which you push into the soil near the tree or plant to deliver water directly to the roots.
My decision to buy the constituent parts rather than the whole thing, and then put them together ourselves was meant to be time saving not money saving, but that couldn’t have been further from the truth.
It took us hours and at the cost of blisters and holes in our fingers which have still not recovered.
And then after Ana connected them all, they didn’t work - water was just flowing out and not reaching half the plants.
We realised we were supposed to have installed regulators as well so each plant receives a certain amount of water and everyone gets their share.
That took hours more of blistering bother.
Irrigation systems do need regular care and attention and there’s a lot to monitor, but despite a few losses they’re broadly doing well.
The calçada guys know all about working under an unforgiving sun – it took four days for the white limestone blocks to all be carefully chipped and placed by hand and tightly tesselated. The result is stunning.
The pool, the deck and the calçada all look amazing, we put some wooden poles in to stop people falling (the protective glass is under construction), and after weeks of looking at the water we finally found the time to take the plunge. Lovely.
The lack of Sr Manuel’s builders doesn’t mean everything is finished – a long line of his and our contractors are still coming and going as the deadline for “finishing” drifts ever into summer.
The electrician occasionally drops by with complaints about his worsening gout while his mate takes up the slack; Rui the water guy pops in for a few hours here and there to keep our plate spinning while he juggles 70-plus other jobs; and the carpenter, plumber, glass people and metal work guys still have a few things to finish.
We’d brought in some help in to hammer in wooden posts, cover the pergolas with willow and waterproof roofing, and to make our old water tanks drinking-water ready by emptying them and scrubbing them clean (much harder than it sounds).
Then things need doing NOW:
* get LED ceiling lights after the Amazon delivery never turned up (drive to the Algarve, realise later we didn’t buy enough)
* pick up finished handmade sink basins from Monchique (drive to the Algarve, realise later the plug holes aren’t big enough)
* fight with angry cork furniture delivery guy (he actually knocked me over with his van as he left)
* pick up new Starlink dish because the old line-of-sight internet providers unexpectedly pulled the plug and left us on EDGE (rather than fibre or 5G) pretty much overnight
* deal with a dramatic water pipe leak here, a demand for a big decision there
But all efforts are currently focussed on the landscaping – the literal moving of mountains...of earth and gravel.
The removal of the construction cabins revealed just how huge an area we have on the top of the hill behind the houses. We need trees, but can’t now plant much until the autumn, so we need ground cover to beautify our eco-luxe lodge.
The process involves breaking up the already baked-hard soil with a giant tractor, then moving and levelling and rolling it with enough of a slope to help water runoff next winter.
At least three truck loads of 23 tonnes of white tout venant were delivered – a mixture of gravel and rock dust which compacts well and will surround every building, make paths and the pétanque court.
Grey tout venant will follow with some gravel, wood chips and mulch...and felled pine trees and white stones for edges.
And with every machine hour - and truck-load of material - our landscaping budget has a big chunk excavated out of it.
The payments have been flowing out as the spending curve accelerates to the end of the project, and amid it all the tourism authority who has given us the loan blocked our final (and pretty significant) block of funding.
“No money until the work is finished” they said.
“We can’t finish until we get the money,” we replied.
After weeks of back and forth, our legendary bank manager Wilson worked some more of his magic and secured an agreement...the cash should arrive this week.
Even with the rest of the loan, we were worried about whether we had enough money to make it over the line.
We’ve thrown all our savings into this, and I’d been putting off the full audit because I was scared about what I might find.
But with a strict landscaping budget to define, we needed to know how much money is left.
I’m glad to report that despite some big and unexpected hits like a broken borehole and spiralling water system costs, the figures just about add up. It’ll be tight, but we should make it...as long as we can welcome guests this summer.
Help us, part 2…
So, for those of you who couldn’t make it here to volunteer...please help us by coming to stay.
With our last burst of helpers expected soon, everything should be open-ready by the end of June, and while the online booking engine is still on the really-must-do-now-but-haven’t-got-time list, please let us know when you’d like to come and stay as paying guests.
It’s a soft opening year, so the prices will be good! Come and visit and claim your free bottle of Alentejo wine...with a story.
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit alastairleithead.substack.com -
“So when do you open?” is a common question as everything on our hillside starts to look a little more finished.
“Last Saturday” is my current response – because that was the original plan.
Great friends of ours from our Bangkok days...and their friends...had booked last year to come and stay when the finish date on the building contract was optimistically set for the end of February.
“Yes, this February,” was my common response (often to the builders) while we prepared for a group of 28 people – half of them children, but we felt that even if it slipped a month or two we’d be all set by May.
It was a very generous offer to help us with a soft opening – to give us the practical experience of running a retreat for a large group with varying demands – safe in the knowledge they are friends and would understand...and give great feedback.
As the year began, and the combination of heavy rain delaying the construction and the growing realisation that we are not super-human led us to suggest they book the larger and more established Pé no Monte hotel nearby.
We are so pleased they did.
Their slimmed down early-arrival group of 20 came over to see us for a tour, a wine tasting and a sardine supper.
The ratio was the same: ten adults to ten children.
Obviously diggers make great climbing frames, rock dust is perfect for sandcastles and “don’t go close to the precipice by the pool” translates into child as “we must go over there.”
The electricity is now connected to all the buildings and the spaghetti water system is working – including to the toilets and showers – but the sinks aren’t quite there to help the water to its final destination.
All but one of the outside doors and windows are now in, the interior doors are ready to hang and the metal safety railings for the mezzanines will go in this week (they could have plunged off those precipices too).
The wine tasting went well, the sardines feast was saved by our friend Adam Cooper’s quick intervention and we ended the day having learned a lot of lessons about hospitality...and health & safety.
Our wonderful daughter Oda has been staying with us – en route to managing the emerging American indie rock artist Taylor Sackson for her first UK tour.
Check out the dates and if you’re local, drop in and show some support for Oda and Taylor (she’s got an amazing voice).
Oda knew it was going to be a busy time in the Valley of the Stars, but none of us anticipated just how manic the last couple of weeks were going to be – it was a proper case of spinning plates while juggling (or a combination of the two).
She arrived in the middle of our filling-the-pool water crisis which I wrote about last time, a task made much more difficult by a broken borehole.
After trying everything he could first, the ever impressive Cristiano and his brother Eduardo set about hauling the pump 120m out of the ground to discover it needed to be replaced...along with its cable, pipe and rope.
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It was another unexpected cost which merely contributes to my active avoidance of checking the accounts to see if we actually have enough money left to finish our project.
My former BBC colleague and audio-genius friend Peter Emmerson helped us through the first two weeks of the podcast launch.
Episode 2 went live yesterday – please head over to the wine blog and sign up if you haven’t already...or just search for Ana & Al's Big Portuguese Wine Adventure where you get your podcasts or have a listen here:
You’ll remember our friend John Rourke from my last despatch: the Scottish strimmer and cork floor fitting fiend who dragged his pal Tony over to cork click-floor our mezzanines.
John said he’d be back to finish the job after a short trip home, but decided to have a heart attack in Scotland instead...I mean, as far as excuses go that’s a pretty good one.
Thankfully he was just 10mins away from Glasgow hospital and out a few days later struggling more with the regime of enforced rest than anything else.
Wishing you a speedy recovery John – all that strimming made him as fit as a butcher’s dog which should help – and in terms of places to keel over I’d certainly choose Glasgow over the hills of Alentejo for speedier emergency care, rather than the scenery.
Most items on our post-it wall of ambition are proving stubborn to shift, but my old university pal Hugh Jennings was also on hand this week to help us make some impact.
“Finish the cork floors” was high up on the running order, and Tony insisted on coming back and giving us a masterclass in click floor installation as we fussed around him trying to help.
Hugh and I moved a lot of heavy things around, unpacked the entire restaurant kitchen, assembled some furniture and conquered a lingering gutter which has been staring at me for weeks, begging to be installed (just in time for the next drought).
And we certainly couldn’t have prepped our sardines and wine tasting day without him...thanks so much again for coming Hugh!
I dropped Hugh off at Faro airport and picked up another old friend Ciaran for the return trip.
Our Algarve adventures always involve big shops and pickups, and after negotiating Cassie the Hilux and a trailer through the narrow streets of Faro, Ciaran was treated to Leroy Merlin DIY store (twice), Makro, a large metal factory, and although spared Ikea, was dragged to the irrigation pipe place.
The sudden arrival of summer means all the trees we have planted need regular watering – all 300 of them.
The irrigation pump failed last year and so we’ve upgraded to a submersible pump for the lake to feed the citrus and the olive trees down in the valley and up on the hill.
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This requires 500m of pipe, scores of fiddly drippers to install and the construction of a small island out of wood and plastic barrels to support and power the pump in the lake.
Then there’s Ana and Oda’s dresser re-decoration job to finish, sealing material for the concrete floors to buy and spread, skirting boards to install, more interiors to order, bills to pay, accounting to put off...and that’s just today.
It really has been one of those times when a week feels like a month...when there’s not enough time in the day or space in my brain.
There’s not even enough space to cram it all into one despatch (but I’ll keep trying).
Oda, Ana, Ciaran and I did all enjoy a night away at the stunning Tróia Design Hotel on the sliver of Alentejo that points at the Setúbal Peninsula just south of Lisbon.
It was work rather than play, as I’d been asked to do a couple of turns at a conference known as the Sleeper Sessions – a high-end networking event for top hotels and international designers.
Matt Turner, editor in chief of Sleeper Media which publishes the influential Sleeper Magazine (among others) invited me to run a couple of their “Sustenance Sessions” after hearing the radio pieces I did for the BBC on off grid living (which you can listen to here and here).
It involved hosting a tasting and talk about Portuguese and Alentejo wines, some background on the kind of madness required to build an off-grid eco-luxe lodge with no prior experience, and stories from my previous war-reporting life.
It was great fun – thanks to Matt and to moderator Guy Dittrich for the invite and for giving me the chance to meet so many real hotel and design people. Hopefully a few of them might even come and stay.
It also inspires me that perhaps the wine tasting/live storytelling part of our business plan might just work…
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit alastairleithead.substack.com -
There have been occasions when I’ve strolled up to our building site expecting a hive of activity, only to discover the Mary Celeste.
Perhaps that’s an apt comparison, given the abandoned ship was found drifting somewhere between the Azores islands and the Portuguese coast in 1872 with no crew – what happened to them remains a mystery to this day.
Tumble weeds don’t even grow here, but I’d swear I’ve seen them in the corner of my eye on those days where a sprinkle of drizzle or an ominous weather forecast has kept everyone away despite a daunting list of deadlines.
Inoculated by past disappointments I wandered up the hill this week with low expectations, only to stumble into rush hour at Paddington Station.
I struggled to find a parking space among the various sized white vans, piles of newly delivered limestone cobbles, and rumbling trucks.
There were electricians and carpenters, gutter fitters and pool people, the plumber, the water guy, delivery drivers, and...drumroll please...the door and window installers!
Our hopes and dreams, our wishes and requests, our letters to Santa Claus...had all answered by the arrival of the PVC people and their large truck of fabulous frames and gorgeous glass.
We’re finally getting somewhere after the many months of transforming a scraggy eucalyptus forest into something approaching an off-grid eco-luxe resort.
And as the workers are seemingly focussing on the finishing line we’re hitting the buy button on chairs and tables, lamps and loungers, umbrellas and bedside tables...to get all the finishings – at least – in the post.
I wondered the scene with my mouth open. I love it when a plan comes together.
But what’s truly amazing is all our wonderful friends who have been dropping everything to answer our call for help.
“I’d like to help with some strimming,” John Rourke messaged a few weeks ago.
With the fire regulations deadline fast approaching for clearing land 50m from every building that is not something you say no to.
Our Scottish friend who lives about 45 minutes away in Cercal arrived with a car-load of strimming machines, all fuelled up and ready for action (he even brought his own water bottles to keep hydrated through the job!).
I’ve been putting off the annual weight-loss programme as long as possible and this was just the kick I needed to get things started.
I should know by now that strimmers emerge from their winter hibernation with missing parts, wobbly fittings and absent essentials which always require at least a couple of trips to the local Stihl shop.
John’s already been strimming his land for weeks and so was totally in the rhythm on the hillside while I was spending ages getting up to speed.
He stayed the night to get an early start and had sorted most of the land above the house before I’d really got anywhere in the citrus grove – moving all the dead agave flowers from last year and trying not to get too tangled up in the ancient un-irrigated grape vines and left over electric fence.
I’d patched up a dodgy wire-strimming fitting which lasted right up until it didn’t – when the whole thing flew off in every direction…including towards the side window of our neighbour Daniel’s car.
While I can’t say for sure that the exploding strimmer was responsible for his shattered glass, it’s probably more likely than a toad with a catapult.
While John strimmed ever onwards, the Stihl shop was sadly awaiting a delivery – providing me with just the excuse I needed to focus on something else for the time being.
And there has been plenty to focus on.
The post-it wall has remained stubbornly static as the daily demands of project managing the workers and keeping power humming and water running has required regular shuttle runs up and down the valley.
Pumps and the various workmen’s tools all running at once tended to trip the fuses, so it required careful management and repeated visits to the fuse box.
Filling the pool without a grid connection was always going to be ambitious, but we’d been told it had to be filled as soon as the final pebble and cement layer had been applied to protect the concrete from cracking in the sun.
A little rough mathematics rounded up to the unlikely figure of 70,000 litres needed to get the infinity pool overflowing, but the cost of bringing in fresh water was prohibitive (to say the least).
We’d stored about 180,000 litres in a pillow tank at the bottom of the valley, and water consultant Rui Faria had the solar pump all connected and tested, but it only runs in the sun.
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We filled our new tanks with 30,000 litres ahead of time, but that was just a start – the key was going to be the boreholes which provide good, clean water and the slight saltiness ideal for a salt-water pool.
But right on cue – after years of working brilliantly – our main borehole dramatically failed and even the brilliant Christiano couldn’t get it going...despite his efforts on the national holiday – the 50th anniversary of the Carnation Revolution.
The only solution was using our neighbour Daniel’s solar system to power-pump water up the hill, but unexpected cloudy skies drained his batteries too...plunging his house into early morning darkness.
Overcast skies have slowed the pumps, but have also reduced the threat to the pool from the sunshine and it is now well on the way to being full.
It really has been all hands on deck – our daughter Oda has arrived from LA to bring a much needed creative touch to the interiors – and we’re hugely grateful to artist Ed for dreaming up the idea of our new logo and to Tim for his design genius in jointly producing something very special. We hope you like it.
We’re tweaking the stars which form the constellation of Cassiopeia and will be recreating the same pattern on our limestone deck of calçada cobbles in front of the main building.
Ex-BBC audio whizz Pete Emmerson has been staying with us too – editing and mastering the first few weeks of our wine podcast which we’ll be launching really soon – and lending a hand on the building site and with the landscaping.
But above (and beyond) the call of duty...John Rourke returned, swapping his car-load of strimmers for click-floor partner-in-crime Tony...and the two of them set about one of the biggest tasks to be keeping us up at night.
I’ve dabbled with click floors for the guesthouse bathrooms, but the cork boards for our mezzanines required another level of skill and dedication.
I’d say they nailed it, but they actually hammered it...and levered it, and tweaked it and fiddled it... and created beautiful floors that we are hugely proud of.
They’ll be back to finish the job next week, and I might push my luck and ask about skirting boards! Thank you sooo much guys.
Everything is starting to take shape, but as April ticks towards May...and more volunteers are preparing to arrive to help...we’re confident we can get this thing done and get this lodge open.
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The only problem – and huge concern that fills us with fear as well as frustration – is the licensing part of the project.
Our architect has joined the crew of the Mary Celeste and left us drifting in our hour of need...three weeks of ghosting has left us panicked that we won’t be able to open for the summer and raise the income we need to start paying back our loan.
It’s a good time and an energising time...but we’re not completely out of the eucalyptus woods yet.
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The first sign of summer is when planting a tree turns from simply picking a spot and digging up a bit of soil...to battering through concrete.
It took just two days of mid-20s Celsius for the ground to turn from being soft and simple to dig, mix in with compost and happily plant, to needing a medieval throwing spear to break the surface and leave us longing for a pneumatic drill to finish the job.
It’s also a sign it’s now probably too late for us to do much of our planned landscaping.
Half the lavender planted in front of our new villa is thriving, while the other half is struggling...the difference being three days and one light shower.
Thankfully our great friends Ed, Rachael and Daisy were visiting – they brought along their great pals Medwin and Emily – and we roped them all into a little plant-off to get in the fruit trees, a few olives, figs and medronhoplants...and even twisted Ed’s arm to design us a new logo.
We have so many more trees and plants to place, but delays to the building work and so much rain lingering in the clay has limited our planting window.
For our first season we will do what we can by laying a lot of gravel and mulch, starting on a cactus garden and mixing in all the cover crops on the vineyard area to improve the soil before we plant next March.
After so much rain we almost got sick of it (we didn’t, of course), but the sudden arrival of ample sunshine and high temperatures also brought a rush of workmen bursting back on site like a field of daisies.
Once the Easter break was out of the way, our hilltop was filled with cars as on one extraordinary day we enjoyed the company of the builders, carpenters, electricians, painters and our water consultant. All on one day.
The pool preparation people even arrived a day early...brilliant, but it created another layer of complication requiring a wild goose chase to track down our plumber whose attendance was courteously requested.
The post-it note wall is back and is as packed and full as ever...but the order of achievement priority has been recalibrated from “quarter one” through “quarter four” to “today”, “tomorrow” and “yesterday”.
Things are certainly happening...I had to go through photographs and the diary simply to remember all the stuff which has been done since my last despatch...and that’s a very good thing.
We have stairs in both apartments and the metal handrail makers will be back on Monday to measure up the safety barriers; the cork floors have arrived; the pool pump is in, and its concrete structure has been prepped for its final pebbly layer which is due next week.
The discovery that our infinity pool overflow tank was too shallow required some quick cement-block action, but that ended well.
The water infrastructure has taken a couple of major steps forward towards flowing – even if our key borehole has for some strange reason stopped working right now and our house supply is dwindling (well, I did want the tank empty in order to paint it with a drinking water seal anyway!).
The solar pump, on neighbour Daniel’s land, is now bringing irrigation canal water hundreds of meters up the valley to mix in with our salty borehole supply (when available); and the house and panel rainwater capture system is almost finished...just in time for the summer drought.
We need about 60,000 litres of mixed and treated water by next Thursday...but that requires electricity to run the pumps and the softener...and clean tanks to store it in.
I messed up on the tank front by asking for soil to be piled onto the sides without properly reinforcing the tank first needing some extra bulldozer hours to undo and redo that job.
And the power grid appears to require the kind of focussed attention not supplied by the occasional drop-ins by the electrician checking on his worker.
At least we found the electrical cable that connects the current guesthouse.
You may remember months of random digging, detective work and the unsuccessful deployment of Niels’ 1980s metal detector to track down the power cable before it reaches the house...and save us a huge rewiring job.
Some carefully selected hand-digging uncovered the illusive little blighter...to great acclaim and relief all round.
That means we can now seamlessly integrate everything into the new system.
Ana celebrated yet another 29th birthday and her morning birthday sandwich illustrated the gift we both want...in fact it’s the same thing I wanted for my birthday...oh, and it’s what we both asked Father Christmas for as well...DOORS AND WINDOWS.
It’s a small thing to ask. No, actually it’s a large thing to ask...and require before anything can be effectively done inside the new buildings...but we did order them last year.
The promised deadline keeps slipping...please, please, please can it be this week??
While our daughter Oda has introduced a new family rule that birthday sandwiches need to be edible, I gambled on the current intermittent fasting regime of “no food before midday” to get away with mixing cheese and corn tortilla, fishpaste, carrot and cucumber with cake decorations.
After two consecutive years of proper surprise trips to Atlantic Islands (Madeira and then the Açores) I totally blindsided my wife this year by not taking her anywhere!
She didn’t expect that!
It wasn’t that much of a surprise...given that we have so many things on the Post-It note wall, but thankfully dinner was more palatable than my sandwich.
We’ve been meaning to go to the fine dining experience place nearest to us – the Michelin mentioned Näperõn in Odeceixe – and at least that was something of an unexpected element of a birthday which also involved a visit to the aptly named Birthday Beach.
It was great...carefully thought through and created “moments” with a great wine list.
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Of course the absence of doors and windows hasn’t stopped us cracking on with the interiors...we haven’t got time to waste.
We finally managed to wrestle the cork oak planks – heft from our ancient fallen tree – from the local carpentry shop.
After weeks of waiting it was a pretty disappointing job, but we transported them down to Ben in nearby Aljezur for him to weave some magic and turn these scratched and scraped, slightly warped planks into a stunning 2m long bar and some fabulous bathroom vanities.
He selected the best of the bunch – the rest will be a possible wine rack and a couple of tables which we will turn our own hands to.
We still have to work out a good solution for the countertop legs, but the stunning wood will be an amazing addition to all the bathrooms and we will mount handmade pottery bowls as sinks.
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Our most recent acquisition trips to the Algarve took us to the workshop of Leonel Telo Cerâmica up the mountains of Monchique.
Leonel was so enthused about the project he started making the first sink before we’d even left the shop!
I made a little video of stage one of the process: do check it out!
The Facebook Marketplace runs also resulted in the collection of two huge electrical cable spools which we’ll convert to dining tables, old iron farming tools we’ll turn into coffee tables and a beautiful old crockery dresser for the main building.
Slowly, slowly we’re collecting some beautiful things and Ana is spending hours poring over chairs and poolside furniture, umbrellas, crockery and décor.
In the race against time that is our hillside, everything we plant from here on in is going to be a challenge, but with water on its way and power coming for the pumps soon we will be turning our attention to irrigation once again.
Hundreds of metres of drip-pipes and a new submersible pump and floating platform for the lake will hopefully help us keep our hedge of two hundred olives alive...and the ones on the hill...and the lavender...and the fruit trees...and...
...and why am I still writing when we have sooooooo much to do.
Até proxima as they say here...see you soon.
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We’ve worried about water for three years now – since we started our crazy off-grid adventure – but had no idea we’d be dealing with too much rather than too little.
Nevertheless, we are still happy to see the heavens open, despite months of above average rainfall – thanks to El Niño – and a massive storm system that’s been sitting off the coast of Ireland and hammering the Iberian peninsula all week.
Lisbon’s steep and narrow streets briefly turned to rivers, a video clip of a rare water spout near the Vasco de Gama bridge in the capital made headlines around the world, and building work here in The Valley of the Stars has pretty much ground to halt.
Of course it’s easier to live with when the temperatures remain in double figures and the sun shines between squalls, topping up our solar system and keeping everything running.
As the climate changes, more extremes are expected, which is why we’ve invested in 200,000 litre pillow tanks to collect all the rain and save it for our guests during the long hot summers.
Sadly, neither the gutters nor the tanks have been installed in time to make use of all the water now overflowing from our lake into a new river which is flowing down the valley.
The system for harvesting rainwater from our house and the solar panels got one step closer this week as we placed and buried the tank and all the associated pipes.
The land also keeps sliding in various places – this week part of the hillside around the lake collapsed – and we do wish our doors and windows had been installed before this latest inundation.
At least the builders invested some time in an innovative, gale-proof construction of wood and insulation foam to block the doors and windows where the kitchens have now been installed.
The delay to this key part of the project has slowed everything down on the building site, but we did get a few things done despite the rain.
The unpolished concrete people were back between showers to try another way of improving our floors (we’re still disappointed in the way they look) and the metal workers installed one of the two staircases,
Heat Pump Paulo connected everything up for the water and underfloor heating – as much as he could until we get all our utilities online (while also providing us all with plates of his famous fabulous rabbit and rice lunch).
We’re being drip-fed a water treatment system, and the absence of an electrician is perhaps expected given the poor relationship between rain and electricity.
At the very least we look forward to the years ahead when the rainwater has soaked through the ground and eventually reached the level of our borehole.
Of course the combination of rain and sunshine is fuelling some pretty impressive springtime sprouting.
We marvel at the green hillsides, the flowering estevas (rockroses), the revived and fast-growing grape vines and the colourful weekly additions to the pointillism painting that is the Alentejo spring.
It’s yellow time at the moment as everything bursts into life, and it’s weird to imagine all this vibrancy will be baked away in a month or two when summer sets in.
And for every day that more power and water is piled into the vegetation, my strimming workload grows.
Areas 50m around every building need to be cleared by the end of April to protect from fire, and three new buildings broadens my Spring fitness regime quite significantly.
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We’re taking advantage of the sodden soil to pull out the tall and woody esteva which needs to be removed every few years as the combination of dry stems and oily leaves burn like little torches.
Fortunately, the large area of eucalyptus plantation on the other side of the hill has been chopped down and dug out, providing a vast fire break if the unlikely was to happen this year.
Everything is so easy to weed when it’s this wet, and so we need to take advantage of it while we can – cleaning up the gravel and planting the trees we bought on a rainy trip to the Monchique mountain nursery Viveiro Denis.
Justo and the builders had managed to get some basic landscaping down before the latest storm and so we are now turning our attention to transforming our building site before we open.
It’s not going to be perfectly manicured straight away – the delays have stopped us from planting as much as we’d like before the summer – but the seeds we planted in the future vineyard have sprouted well and we will be ploughing the greenery in once we get a few dry days.
Our soil sample results came back with uninspiring levels of most things, but grapes aren’t that fussy...and hopefully our half hectare can grow some wine-able grapes in a few years.
We aim to plant next March – and have a couple of weeks left to register our land and mark out where we will be planting what kind of grapes.
We were lucky enough to meet winemaker and viticulturalist Miguel Mimoso through our friend at the nearby Vicentino winery, and popped down to visit his project in the Algarve for a tour, some tips and some wine tastings.
Arvad is a beautiful winery producing some amazing wines and I’ll be writing about them and their Negra Mole grapes soon on our other blog The Big Portuguese Wine Adventure where we’ll be launching the podcast series next month. Check it out!
We’ve also been back to Vicentino to see their amazing new winery and have recorded an extra podcast episode there.
Miguel has already visited our land and we’ll see what he says about the most suitable grape types when he sees the soil sample results.
Today we’re tucking into an Easter lunch of Niels and Sybille’s finest lamb – born and bred roaming free: lots of amazing days and then one really bad one...the first instalment of half a sheep been slow cooking since yesterday while the rest languishes in the freezer.
We’re welcoming our neighbour Daniel (whose landscaping vision of his property is really starting to bear fruit) and our friends Tim & Trish who have moved into their new place (which needs a bit of good weather work) and have been battling a leaky roof and an exploding shower.
The lamb will be spectacular, but the party of the week has already been and gone.
On Good Friday our builder Joaquim invited us to a gathering in his village. We thought it was a traditional Easter event, but it turned out to be his 78th birthday.
Joaquim has been the bedrock of our building project – bounding up and down scaffolding, skilfully bricklaying our curved wind-break wall, sharing his lunch almost every day with Albie the dog and injecting a wonderful mischievous energy to our building site.
He and his pals were dressed in their Cante Alentejano best - periodically breaking out into traditional song throughout the lunch.
His whole family were there and we were honoured to be his guests.
As we left, he told us his work was finished at our site and he wouldn’t be coming back. He’ll be missed...but hopefully he and his choir can come back and help us open the lodge...once the power’s on and the doors and windows are in.
All the best Joaquim...and thanks for everything...here’s to 78 more!
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We love having friends over – especially the ones who haven’t been to our place in a while.
“Wow...you’ve done so much! It’s amazing...it’s almost finished,” they all say and we breathe out a little, smile and nod to each other acknowledging the reminder of just how far we have actually come in such a short time.
Blessed by the reassurance we aren’t complete idiots we can relax into a nice lunch and present a little Alentejo tell-and-taste wine story, imagining a day when we’re finished enough to open and do this for strangers.
Then all the worries start flooding back in.
But before I plunge into the long list of sleep-sapping challenges, something else lifted my spirits this week...something that reminded me of the way the building started.
It’s all about the small things, and it first happened when this whole crazy project hung in the balance, when Ana and I took turns telling the other why it was madness and when the loan was about to time out without a single receipt being filed.
Despite having no builder under contract, no construction permit and no deposit paid, a large pile of steel reinforcing rods turned up one day.
They weren’t invited, they weren’t expected, they hadn’t been paid for, but yet they were there – maybe ten thousand euros’ worth – on the bit of flat land that used to be a eucalyptus forest.
That’s when we realised it was going to happen.
This week it wasn’t an arrival which marked a milestone, but it was the departure...of a machine which has fascinated me since it first landed.
The giant red cement mixer on wheels scoops up ratios of sand, gravel and cement by the bulldozer bucket.
It churned out foundations, pillars and beams...and now it’s gone.
Wooden boards, building materials, scaffolding have all slowly been melting away and everything starting to look a bit less like a building site and a bit more like an off-grid eco-luxe countryside lodge.
Maybe we are almost finished?
The heat pumps have finally migrated from sheltering under plastic on the hillside to taking up their positions ready for installation, and our focus has firmly shifted towards the interiors which Ana has been hammering away at for months now.
Malcolm Gladwell argues you need 10,000 hours to attain true expertise in anything and Ana’s not far off when it comes to developing the style of our interiors.
The beds are ready for delivery, the leather sofas and beautiful headboards are here, one kitchen is on its way from Germany, two more are coming from nearby, we have fridges, a stove, cork flooring on order, marble tables being made and are investigating lighting.
We have to find the perfect wine tasting glasses, the right crockery, bedside tables, wardrobes, chairs, patio furniture...the Excel sheet is long and sprawling.
It’s a lot of shopping: sourcing, chasing, finding, thinking, researching, calculating and delving for discounts.
An unexpectedly speedy car service date gave us a day in the Algarve to wander and ponder in shops and factory stores and with the new-found confidence to spot a deal and go with it.
It was an expensive day but a fun day – we found ourselves smiling quite a lot – and it was punctuated by our regular Algarvian sushi lunch.
It’s curiously calming to spend large amounts of borrowed money, knowing that every single thing we buy is one less thing we need to buy.
The receipts are piling up and I’m desperately trying to keep up with the accounting: are we over budget (yes), is it by too much (hopefully not).
Should we have invested in the two stand up paddle boards for guests to rent out? (Probably not). Are they a good addition to the business and what we are offering? (Probably).
Sadly we missed this month’s auction, which is probably best given what we picked up last time around (a fruit machine was not on the Excel sheet).
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This week’s hugely welcome visitors were our pals Richard and Pauline who run a lovely café in the Algarve called Earth and brought visiting Dutch journalist/photographer couple Jaaruen and Eline to see our project.
“Congratulations,” Richard said...which stopped me in my tracks: that’s the kind of thing you say when something’s finished.
The floors are still a mishmash of colours from yellow to greige and our unpolished concrete people have gone very quiet on us since trying a new treatment which failed to solve the problem.
Oh, and the big concrete poop remains a defining feature.
There’s the obvious absence of doors and windows accompanied by builder’s shrug and the concerning ease at which “beginning of March” became “beginning of April.”
Electricity cables loll against walls and the water treatment station is still a work in progress, but “will we get the licence in time?” is still our most common refrain.
It’s not a baseless fear.
Our engineer keeps telling us of another tourist lodge that still hasn’t been licensed more than a year since it was finished...and we have been trying to get paperwork for our guesthouse for almost three years now.
We’ve been throwing everything at it – the surveyor has already been to precisely map out where all the buildings ended up – and we are on the town hall’s fast track programme...but that really depends on the track: dirt roads are a lot slower than tarmac.
Our dirt track has been particularly slow recently because of all the rain, and a gaping cavern had opened which Cassie the Hilux was increasingly struggling to navigate.
I may have passed my Portuguese exam last week, but I still didn’t quite follow the Cow King who I bumped into at the building materials shop a couple of weeks ago when he announced something about rocks.
It was all good, I just didn’t know exactly what he meant, but I did understand his phone conversation with Ana “your husband doesn’t speak much Portuguese” he said, “but I have a load of rocks which you can have to repair the road.”
And so we had a workout, and I think it worked out.
We also have the Cow King to thank for our lunch, along with a failing freezer, which led Ana to reach for the bottom drawer and something meaty from the hunting club.
It’s always worth having a bit of freezer space for when O Rei das Vacas drops by with blood-dripping blue plastic bags of wild boar (wild boar) or venison.
With the clock ticking on the lifespan of my mum & dad’s old John Lewis fridge freezer (which must be at least 25 years old), the javali was released and slow-cooked by Ana to perfection.
Slow cooking also sums up my experience with DHL Express, which is expressing no real urgency in delivering my original birth certificate and a new officially stamped one from the UK so we can take the next bureaucratic step towards Portuguese longevity.
Ana has Portuguese citizenship and now I have my shiny new A2 language qualification we just need some stamped, translated, stamped again, re-officiated, and double-authenticated paperwork and we get new passports.
Toda a gente adora um novo passaporte.
Please keep watching this space...but I do have temporary residency until 2027, so we should be OK.
I thought the whole learning a language thing might be the hardest – and it has been one of the hardest things I’ve ever done...and this is just stage one...but hey...just like this whole crazy adventure it’s all aboot surprising yourself, eh? (IYKYK)
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I don’t remember a week like it. It lasted a month, but was gone in a flash. The emotional rollercoaster was so steep the cars barely stayed on the tracks.
A powerful storm brought thunder-flashes and torrential rain, battered the valley with hailstones and scared Simon the dog so much he bolted from just outside our front door and fled into the darkness on the worst of nights.
We imagined him drowned in a ditch or gored by a wild boar, we searched the land with flashlights, drove the muddy tracks, and barely slept as our little Los Angeles dog had to learn survival in the wild at 12 years old as the storm raged on.
At first light we drove the surrounding countryside shouting his name wondering why he hadn’t come home.
We picked through mudslides and dredged pools hoping not to find his body, we put those awful missing dog posters up around town and asked everyone we know to spread the word in their WhatsApp groups knowing more bad weather was on the way.
Our dam was leaking – in at least three places – the waterlogged clay wall slipping down the steep slope, and we started to think it might actually break and send millions of litres of water and mud sweeping down the valley.
After three months and two attempts to ship an Australian-made dam sealer from The Pond Specialist in the UK and hundreds of euros more spent importing it twice (thanks Brexit) we’d finally scattered the “Damit!” on the lake surface, but honestly didn’t hold out much hope.
Our road out of the valley was blocked by a slipped timber truck, then a vast cavern was carved out by the flood so now it’s only just passable...and I had two Portuguese exams to get to and get through.
The to-do list was speculative rather than realistic...although everything on it really needs to be done...
But here we sit in a moment of calm on our rollercoaster ride at the top of a hill with clear skies, waiting to see what’s coming next: how many dips and climbs we have to barrel through, how many hoops we need to loop until we get to stop for a bit.
The month-long week all began with a Plasma Party.
Our pillars of stability in this extraordinary week were Alan and Margery Gledson – our great friends for whom nothing is impossible.
Anything that needs to be done can be done...but a missing dog is either alive or dead and there’s nothing anyone can do to help you cross that uncertain canyon until you know which of those it is.
But before that chaos began and with a storm still approaching we’d got straight into the to-do list.
“Container plan” was top of the list and that involved converting our rusted yellow shipping container into a beautiful, functioning new building.
The 12m long metal beast will be the water treatment plant, a winter-storage area for furniture, and potentially a place to put a couple of chest freezers...once the proper power network is done.
I’d bought two off-the-shelf PVC windows, to fit along with the €20 one bought at the Wheel of Fortune auction, and neighbour Daniel had donated his old basement door.
Alan had ground off the rust, we had sandpaper, large pots of paint, the ever-willing Ray Morison in town to help us out...and we had Niels: Prince of the Plasma Gun.
And we had a plan for how to make it work this time.
Our first attempt to plasma-cut a couple of slots in the container for the water pipes to pass through had ended in disappointment and the use of a backup angle grinder.
The chain of power cable extensions running from a dodgy socket through a series of muddy puddles wasn’t going to cut it...or cut anything with a power-hungry 10,000C plasma gun and its compressor in crime.
For Plasma Party part two, Alan and I hauled the generator into the back of Cassie the Hilux and up the hill.
Once the first hole was measured, marked and prepped we realised it wasn’t going to be all smooth cutting...old and dirty fuel was probably the cause of the stuttering start.
Only when we split power consumption with the dodgy power cable did we start to get somewhere, and while Niels gave me a 101 in generator maintenance the rest of the gang were furiously painting.
Niels accurately cut small metal tabs which could be drilled and bent back to secure the wooden frames made from recycled planks from Joep and Vera’s now-finished and fabulous-looking building site. Great job guys!
Two days later the door and windows were in, the gaps were sealed and the job was nearly done.
Next up will be jamming together a wooden frame on the inside walls to fill insulation and investing in some sandwich panel roofing to handle the heat of the summer sun...oh, and repainting the white walls washed away by the weather.
At least Alan & Marge had made it to the beach a couple of times before the storm hit – we were inland on a wine podcast recording trip at the remarkable Adega Mayor winery and stayed overnight in a pousada in an old monastery we’d not been to before in Vila Viçosa.
I’ll be writing all about our time with CEO Rita Nabeiro and winemaker Carlos Rodrigues on the wine blog The Big Portuguese Wine Adventure, and featuring the trip in our upcoming podcast series on Alentejo.
While we’d been living it up in the interior, it had been a terrible night back in the valley – Garfie had been outside barking at the thunder and lightning (to keep it away) all night...right outside the guesthouse door...and Simon had been shaking under Alan & Margery’s covers.
When we got home nobody had slept and there was more weather on the way – but “dig out plants and clear up behind the house” was on the ta-da list with huge thanks to Ray and the Gledsons.
Our fire was lit, the weather had arrived and Simon popped out for a quick pee when suddenly a huge clap of thunder struck and spooked him so much he raced off into the dark...in a second he was gone.
I returned from my second Portuguese exam of the week to join the search party but after hours of looking we came inside hoping he would be strong enough to make it through the night.
Simon’s a city dog – born in Los Angeles – he’s travelled the world with us for more than 12 years but has never spent a night outside on his own.
When I met and married Ana I was lucky enough to become Oda’s stepdad and we decided not to have any more kids. Nine months after our first wedding Simon arrived.
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I’d suggested a cat, but the girls found a little dog called Simon in a rescue place in LA called Bark ‘n’ B*****s.
(It’s how we are related to Drew Barrymore...she adopted her dog from there the following day, so we can say with full confidence that our dog has sniffed the butt of Drew Barrymore’s dog).
The “Dog Dad” hat that Daniel gave me certainly fits even when I don’t wear it.
Simon’s been a part of our life every step of the way, from LA to Nairobi, to San Francisco (via Sweden) and here to Portugal where countryside living has grown on him.
Garfie’s the guard dog, Simon’s the lap dog getting grumpier and more assertive as he ages gracefully.
I’ve been preparing for the day when he will no longer be with us...and I know just how hard that is going to be...but both of us felt this wasn’t his time just yet.
We used the hours before the incoming storm to do everything we could to find him...and then did something we had done once before in the face of trauma...we went to the beach.
When we had watched fire consume our valley and thought our house and everything in it had gone – and there was nothing more we could do – we went to the beach...and then the phone rang telling us all was OK.
Amazingly the same thing happened again. The call came just as we arrived in Odeceixe for lunch with Alan & Marge.
Thanks to our neighbours Margarida and Vitor – and our fantastic WhatsApp support group of surrounding friends – we discovered Simon had fled to a neighbour’s house, had fought their dogs and spent the night under their car.
And it turns out Vitor has built a radio studio in the valley...in view of our house...to help him relaunch Radio Odemira...now wouldn’t you believe it? A new project on the horizon!
Simon was very shaken, cut by brambles and dog bites and had developed a thousand yard stare, but he was alive and he was back home and we could breathe again.
Stupid dog. Stupid animals – why do we have animals? Because life’s a little sadder without them.
The storm has now passed, but the lake overflow pipes are still being tested to capacity as a river now flows down the hill.
But the dam doesn’t appear to be leaking – it seems the Damit! who did what it said on the label (thanks Ben and co at The Pond Specialist) – and the Cow King has offered us rocks to fill the hole in the road.
Alan & Margery are back home in Northumberland (sadly, for them, they took the weather with them), out to-do list is shorter, and England beat Ireland unexpectedly in the rugby...so I guess things are looking up.
Let’s see where the rollercoaster take us next...
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It was my first live auction and despite being online it was still very exciting.
Exciting enough for me to keep on asking Ana if she was sure she didn’t want to bid on that too-small corner cupboard or a dining room table which she’d already dismissed as being not our style.
We’re trying to find unique pieces of furniture and create our own interior décor, and so agreed to bid on a few bedside tables, a Chinese cabinet, a “possible dresser”, three camel seats and some candlesticks...oh, and a fruit machine.
We had started the online bidding for these a few days before – along with an old framed map of Portugal, a Japanese painting, some clay pots and a patio furniture set.
But a flurry of emails informed us we’d been outbid on pretty much all of them by the time the live auction began.
Being an Auction House in the Algarve, it’s a long way from us in the Alentejo, and so we opted for the live streaming option from home rather than being in the room.
The next four hours were spent watching the lots come and go while learning phrases like “fair warning” which was usually said before the gavel was finally swung.
It was addictive and it was fun and Ana mostly protected me from myself.
We began with the very best of intentions, but when the final lot was sold and the fantasy world of the bidding bubble burst, we were the proud new owners of a box of brass candlesticks, two Thai coffee pots, a second-hand PVC window...and an Italian Job movie-themed fruit machine.
What a bargain.
Candlesticks aside, flashing minis and Michael Caine in full cockney are a must-have for any self-respecting Portuguese wine-themed eco-luxe lodge. Aren’t they?
Ana’s excitement over the slot machine quickly faded when she realised it wasn’t a pinball machine...and then there was the small matter of transporting it from the Algarve.
Having checked it was OK to move the thing horizontally, I attached the trailer to Cassie the Hilux and Simon the dog and I headed to Faro for a little adventure.
On arrival, the auctioneer overruled his colleague and advised we went vertical...with early 2000s electronics and no guarantee it would make it home in good working order.
A full hour of faffing later and the fruit machine was riding the Toyota like a 50-cal gunner on a Somali Technical battle car – strapped upright to the cab, head poking over the top – and the hardtop was bouncing around in the back of the trailer...along with the PVC window.
Avoiding motorways and low bridges Simon and I slowly wound our way back up to the Alentejo and despite a light shower we all made it home in good working order.
As soon as Ana and I had managed to extract the thing from the truck and hauled it inside, Michael Caine started shouting about “it’s a big job lads” and chastising us for doing more than blowing bloody doors off while lights flashed and Rule Britannia blared out of the back.
Cor blimey. Take i’ fro’ me lads, ‘e aint arf laird.
Thankfully the sellers were thoughtful enough to include a bag of old one pound coins and 50p pieces, and once again we found ourselves spinning the wheel of fortune.
Please indulge me for extending the metaphor, but everything we’re doing here for our building project does feel like a bit of a gamble even though we’re still backing ourselves with reasonable odds of success.
The to-do list is so long it often paralyses me when I try and work out where to start.
I sometimes fall back on digging weeds out of the gravel, or pulling up tall and woody esteva rock rose plants (a fire risk best dealt with by uprooting when the soil is soaked)...simply to see progress and feel like I’m doing something.
There’s obviously a secret to getting everything in line – whether it be cherries or water infrastructure – but just like my new relationship with Michael Caine...it’s probably going to be a while before we hit the jackpot.
There are just so many tricks to learn: knowing when to go high when the odds say you should go low and guessing when to hold or what to nudge first.
The answer to that is the plumber...who still hasn’t replaced all the 90 degree bends in the water pipes emerging from the buildings.
The great thing about owning the keys to a fruit machine is you can’t lose...and that’s where the reel life/real life parallel ends.
We have a lot to lose – we’ve ploughed all our savings into this crazy off-grid project and it’s reaching a crucial stage.
And that’s why today – in my 125th despatch from the Valley of the Stars – more than three years into this off-grid adventure, I’m asking you to help us to do what we need doing right now...if you can.
If you don’t have the time to volunteer, but think you know someone who can, please share this post
This blog isn’t just personal therapy, it’s an amazing support group, it’s the source of comforting messages, of advice and assistance.
But with just a few months to go before we need to get our place open, now is the time to act: come and stay, roll up your sleeves and help us get it over the line.
I’ve been having recurring landslide nightmares – mostly because we have had a real life landslide nightmare where the heavy rain and our post-fire extreme bulldozer gardening to shore up the dam caused a pretty dramatic collapse, but it’s also perhaps a deeper metaphor for our precarious project.
According to our contract, the building should be finished this month, but amid additions and delays our pursuit of fixed timelines for the various threads of jobs have been brushed off with a nasty case of builder’s shrug.
We don’t know when the PVC people will come and throw the bloody doors in but we’re told it’ll be soon and then we’ll have space for volunteers to stay.
I realised just how important it is to get help when I received a phone call from Northumberland which gave me a rare moment of calm – it was Alan Gledson and Marge offering to come out again for ten days and help us out.
They are a force of nature. We need forces of nature to inspire us, encourage us, motivate us and work with us.
So if you are strong and active, up for a challenge, have a week free and can get over here, we can offer you free lodgings and time to explore Europe’s last wild coast in exchange for donating time and experience to us.
We need help with the following:
* Aggressive tree planting
* Digging and seeding land so it’s green by May
* Painting walls
* Reconstructing a footpath
* Building things with wood and concrete
* Transforming a shipping container into storage rooms and water filtration station: insulated, painted, en-roofed
* Creating a car park with grow-through concrete bricks and sand
* Landscaping gravel and wood chips
* Turning a concrete box into a wine cellar
This crazy schedule isn’t for everyone, and of course the alternative to grafting is coming here to relax once we’re open and supporting us by staying in our lodge!
If you’d like to come and see us please drop us a line but also fill out this form...we’ll get an idea of what you have experience doing and when you might be available.
Thank you so much...I’m sorry to ask, but it would really help us right now.
And if you come we’ll provide free access to the fruit machine...once I’ve found the volume control...but as Michael Caine keeps telling me: “Cor blimey...it’s a big job.”
Oh, and if you have any pre-2017 pound coins or post-1997 fifty pence pieces do bring them when you visit for the machine...we trade them for wine.
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Like most of us, I’m glad January’s over...but not for the usual reasons.
There wasn’t anything particularly dry about it...neither in terms of rainfall nor alcohol (but it is my birthday month and so the no booze thing never really works out to be honest).
I can’t really blame the cold darkness either...there’s been bright sunshine for the last two weeks, we’ve had a couple of unseasonably warm days over 20C (sorry)...and we even went to the beach for a dip and a clifftop fondue party.
But the stress caused by challenges on the building site, boring bureaucracy and a particular pipe intervention have made it one of the worst few weeks of off-grid living so far.
And that’s despite the fantastic birthday celebrations, which were extremely cheesy, cakey, sandwich-y and soaked in sunlight, sauvignon blanc and single malt.
So what am I complaining about?
The heavy rain not only ground everything to a halt around our three new buildings, it also created even more work...and messy work at that.
The flooded holes and trenches gave a classic “First World War movie set” vibe and the overwhelming sense it was going to take a very long time to get everything finished.
The newly repaired submersible pump (with thanks to German Paul) was working hard to empty the trenches and holes in the clay, so pipes and cables could be laid.
But the whole place was a mud bath, with grumpy builders swearing out hundreds of metres of pipes and rolls of heavy electrical cables.
Nudges from our engineer about another newly-built tourist lodge nearby whose owners have been “waiting more than a year for a license to open” didn’t help our growing sense of doom and January gloom.
José’s intention was to warn us that not prioritising bureaucracy could cost us dearly.
But with a relatively simple part of the process already trapped in the town hall, it sent us into a spiral of negative thinking: “if we can’t open, how do we start paying back our loan...”
I discovered another landslide on the hill in front of our house courtesy of the heavy rain, and our biological treatment plant remained a pile of upturned tanks languishing in a hardening mass of mud, while we waited our turn for bulldozer time.
Various workmen were occasionally dropping into the site and thanks to some good advice from friends, we discovered the plumbing outside our buildings had not been done to code.
All the out-coming water pipes had 90 degree bends in them – meaning that if they were ever blocked we would never be able to clean them and the floors would flood until we could dig everything up.
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Normally the maximum angle of a bend in a pipe should be 45 degrees, so that a drain cleaning wire can be pushed through and any blockage cleared.
Our contractor Sr Manuel didn’t think there was any need to change them, despite us pointing this out.
But our water consultant Rui was due on site to plan the tank refit and so we thought we’d ask his opinion.
An opinion which was very much in line with ours, but one expressed surprisingly aggressively...by shouting down the phone, grabbing his angle grinder and cutting through all the pipes so they would have to be replaced.
This was our first major diplomatic incident in the Valley of the Stars!
Although Rui made the point, there were no doubt going to be consequences and so that led to sleepless nights of searching for the appropriate paragraph in the building code to be prepared for a confrontation.
The 15 working day town hall deadline was also ticking down for us to submit an unknown document signed by we weren’t sure who...something else to lie awake worrying about once Ana found the right section of official drainpipe building code and discovered we were right.
And when I did eventually get to sleep it was only to enjoy the recurring nightmare of me having forgotten about something in the infrastructure plan (one which may still come true!)
All of this came alongside a lack of water flowing from the canal into the new 200,000 litre pillow tank, silence from the unpolished concrete people and our continuing inability to find where the current electrical cable enters the original guesthouse...to integrate it into the new system.
So it was a great relief to see our architect Gonçalo on site to talk documents, and hear about his plan to start applying for permission to use the buildings well ahead of them being finished.
Individual frustrations piled up on each other, but the daily ups and downs translated into a weekly line graph heading kind of up and to the right.
Our friends once again stepped in to help advise us and keep us sane.
Vera & Joep with advice on pipe angles, Ola on how to diplomatically approach the builder (“is it worth upsetting him?”) and Niels and Sybille through a 1980s metal detector, a pan of Swiss cheese bubbling on a clifftop, and a tide clock which tells us the best time to visit the beach.
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The surprise birthday clifftop cheese fondue picnic accompanied by Portuguese Brut and Niels’ hand-crafted sauvignon blanc made for a fabulous day which blended seamlessly into an entertaining night with new friends Tim & Trish.
Just like me, Tim used to run around with a camera getting shot at for a living...but he would spend months embedding with rebel troops or the under-reported sides to a story, freelancing for all the big news networks.
An American, he decompressed in New York State through wood & metal working and boat building before meeting and marrying Trish and deciding to move to Alentejo.
They’ve bought a place not too far away from us, sensibly On the grid, and are looking forward to moving in very soon after months of house hunting and living out of a suitcase.
The detectorist intervention came as Niels and I tried to find the centimetre thick cable linking the solar control room to our guesthouse which is buried up to a metre deep.
Some old Northern rugby club friends in a “Banality” WhatsApp group made many suggestions, including turning to Twitching Justino or one of his ilk – the guys who found us water – for more divining inspiration, but I think we’re going to take the classic prop-forward “route one” and search for a cable with a bulldozer.
A line traced out by the feint hum of a metal detector and some creative thinking has given us the best-guess place to try, and what could possibly go wrong?
I shall report back...and yes, I’ll make sure the power’s off before letting Justo go mad with a large metal bucket.
But with a large intake of breath while taking a couple of days away from the madness, things went pretty well in the end.
The expected confrontation over sawn off pipes fizzled into brought agreement, the carpenters put in the hours to install the pergolas, the electrician started drilling boxes to everything and the pipes and cables were buried with sand and clay.
The war is over and the trenches are covered and levelled – it all looks sooooo much better – and while I’m sure there are other minefields ahead, in one big bulldozer day we managed to remove, clean up, refit and bury the bio-treatment tanks ready for the next rain.
The towering 15 cubic meter water tanks were lowered onto sand in a deep pit behind the container/water treatment station to be and the pebble-pool people agreed to a more realistic installation date than two weeks’ time.
This was never going to be easy, and while we’re still loving the lifestyle we’re hoping this is the last big bump on the race to the starting line...for the next stage of opening our doors (when they’re delivered) and welcoming guests.
All in all we’ve ended the week very firmly up – still having the nightmares and worrying about the timeline, but at least not overwhelmed by it all.
But sadly the best laid plans to get Albie, the Little Black Dog, some training at Dog Whisperer Emma’s place in the Algarve were dashed by my efforts to get him into a harness which sent him heading for the hills.
Albie gone again, but sooner or later – hopefully – Albie back.
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“Why didn’t I think of that?” is a question I’ve beaten myself up asking many times in this odd new life when the latest thing to go wrong has gone wrong.
And it’s one I ponder while looking at a landslide, a flood and a jumble of upturned tanks on the hill below our building site which just before the storm was an almost-finished water treatment system.
I make a lot of mistakes by rushing into things, not preparing properly and thinking stuff can be done in an impossible period of time...but I can’t take the blame for everything.
In 2002 the then US Secretary of Defence, Ronald Rumsfeld, explained the lack of evidence for Iraqi weapons of mass destruction in a speech referring to “known-knowns, known-unknowns and unknown-unknowns.”
Like Secretary Rumsfeld, and given my lack of experience living in this self-reliant way, it’s the unknown-unknowns which often get me.
“If only I’d thought about that thing I didn’t know might happen, before it did,” makes me feel better when I say it out loud, but it doesn’t mean the whole water treatment tanks aren’t now trashed.
It wasn’t always like that: in my job as a BBC foreign correspondent, I learned to make risks rather than take risks and do a pretty good assessment about whether or not they were worth the reward.
“Flying into Ebola and active insurgency-land in the Democratic Republic of the Congo?”
Yes, it was worth it, but it took me ages to persuade the bosses back in London I wasn’t insane, and to apologise to Ana afterwards for not telling her I was going.
I’ve learned a lot about how to do stuff off the grid, but I often get really frustrated when my own stupidity or lack of properly thinking things through means I not only fail to achieve the thing I set out to do, but actually make it worse: more difficult and more expensive to rectify.
This happens a lot.
I was never terribly good at DIY before, so why should that change with practice? (it really should change with practice, shouldn’t it?)
The “unstoppable force vs immovable object” approach I took in my previous job for getting that interview, that access to a place to tell a story and then get it on air doesn’t work with installing a solar water pump kit without instructions.
I mounted the solar panels onto the aluminium rack ahead of installing the pump (having received the missing parts), but the whole insanely heavy thing somehow flipped over in the gale force winds in this week’s storm.
Force of some wind vs badly secured object.
It doesn’t look like the panels were smashed, as they toppled into a pile of sand, but we’ll see if it still works when it all gets connected up.
If only...I’d secured the struts, or weighed it down with rocks, or left it face down to start with...given the high winds forecast.
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As a reporter for a big organisation it was a lot easier getting hold of people who want to get on the telly and have their perspective heard than it is being the annoyingly pushy foreigner in rural Portugal who should know by now that things take time.
The energy and tenacity to push to the point of obsession (or destruction) – whether it be in South Sudan or post-earthquake or hurricane - once led an editor to nickname me “the Duracell Bunny” for my persistence and determination, but that approach clearly isn’t working with one of our key people.
He’s harder to speak to than some African presidents.
We’ve had a lot of rain recently – our lake has never been so full – but the combination of large amounts of surface water on clay and the presence of newly dug trenches for our pipes and cables is not, it turns out, a good one.
I wrote last week about the giant mole holes for the infrastructure which have turned into swimming pools and waterlogged trenches.
Our building site currently looks more like a First World War movie than our vision of an eco-luxe lodge.
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But things took a turn for the worse this week in the absence of our builder and what I would have expected to have been a “known-known” to him.
We’ve placed the water treatment station on the hillside – a sealed large three tank system, followed by two open tanks for reed bed biological cleaning and then a final tank so that every drop of recycled water is used for irrigation up on the future vineyard.
The holes were dug to precise specifications, sand was bought, delivered and then levelled by our good selves before the bulldozer carefully lowered them into place.
We were just waiting for the digger to return, load the reed-bed tanks with gravel and backfill everything – job done – but the wet conditions haven’t been ideal.
While waiting and to protect the system from rain I cut a couple of channels to divert water around the tanks to stop them from being inundated, overturned and generally trashed...but sadly that is exactly what has now happened.
The deluge, combined with the new trenches not being diverted into the lake, created a landslide which has flipped and buried the biggest tank in wet mud and clay, floated another up out of a 3m deep hole and smashed all the pipes linking the system together.
It’s a total mess – it’s going to cost more to undo and then redo than it cost to do it in the first place and the work will eat up vital time. It was the worst of a series of setbacks we suffered this week.
Angry letters from the town hall about unsubmitted documents, continuing fighting over the unpolished concrete people and the unrequited pursuit of our African president.
We should of course “be careful what you wish for” – even if more rain is what this region really needed.
I’ve covered enough massive storms to know there’s not much you can do about big weather in big nature...but I wish I’d thought about diverting the trenches...and I wish our builders had as well.
When the downhill trench to our solar house was finished earlier in the week and I realised it bisected a stream and a swale that usually bring a lot of water to our lake, it got me thinking.
In the absence of our contractor on site we took things into our own hands and pushed reluctant builder Justo to block his new trench and lower some ground to encourage the water towards the lake.
If we’d left it, the solar house would have been flooded and all our solar batteries would have been destroyed. That’s a known-known.
If only he – and we – had thought about the impact of the other long-drop trench on the other side of the hill...directing thousands of litres of water into our thousands of euros worth of tanks.
The rain has stopped, but the rivers and streams continue heading into our lake which is almost overflowing – as is our downstream neighbour Daniel’s.
I’ve cleared the overflow pipes, placed some rocks and boulders to slow down the flow and we will wait to see where the deluge goes...we’ve warned friends further down the valley, but the rain may have stopped just in time.
No more rain is forecast for a week, once it’s drier we can bring back the machines, dig everything out and start all over again.
I’ve learned a lot from friends and from experience, but sometimes I wish I didn’t have to.
There are great parts to living this life, but sometimes I wish it wasn’t just us with all the responsibility for guessing what might happen, what might go wrong, before it does.
And having to coordinate everything ourselves leaves gaps of plausible deniability where people with greater experience can make excuses for not thinking ahead and acting appropriately. Oh well…
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We have a mole problem – a big mole problem.
I went up on site the other day and the monsters had eaten their way through our whole building site.
Not just a few little hills here and there, but trenches...metre after metre of them...and some of them really deep.
I mean check this out...
I suspect the Mole in Chief to be Justo – maestro of the machines and digger of the ditches – but in truth, I’m delighted to see his little valleys criss-crossing their way between our buildings and up and down our hills.
Operation Infrastructure is now well underway and the emphasis is firmly on me to come up with a creative way of helping our contractor Sr Manuel understand the design of our complicated water system and place all the right pipes in the same trenches as the electrical cables.
I’m not sure what qualifies me to make such bold decisions, but I suppose I have spent far too much time over the last year or so playing with coloured pencils.
(I knew that Geography degree would come in handy one day).
I do claim to be something of an expert in such things if you listen to the BBC World Service: the two radio pieces I made went out on Business Daily on January 1st and January 2nd.
And I even turned my hand to Instagram and The Facebook for a vertical version of our off-grid story (do check it out...if it gets liked enough the Beeb might ask for another one...apparently off-grid posts are popular these days!)
Back on the building site Sr Manuel asked again: “so it’s three different types of water into each building?” with the roll of his eyes, as I unravelled the latest iteration: a large A1 sized electrical map layered with acetate sheets stuck together with tape and coloured scrawl.
“The blue is the 40mm pipes and the green is the 32...” and as I began, I realised my Portuguese wasn’t up to it...and even if it was, this wasn’t really going to help.
Being the water-bore that I am, I will hold myself back by summarising for new readers that we have tried to future-proof our supply by accommodating different qualities of treated water (toilet, showers, drinking water) in case we have shortages ten years down the line.
Outside on the building site in the chilly dew of the morning, wasn’t really the time or the place to show off my artwork, and anyway I need Water Rui to approve it all before the pipes started being rolled out, cut and connected.
“Let’s try it again over coffee at the meeting tomorrow,” I added. The words cafezinho (little coffee...I love the diminutive form) and amanhã de manhã (tomorrow morning) were greeted with a nod which was unusually clear (for Sr Manuel) by way of indicating his agreement.
It’s been a long journey reaching the point where we not only know where our water is going to come from, but where it’s going to be treated and how it’s going to get there.
It takes a complex system of tanks, pipes, pumps and treatment scattered across the property and I often wonder if it’s actually going to work.
We’ve already used a couple of kilometres of the 6.2km of pipes we bought and hopefully we’ll have enough to get it all flowing.
But for now it’s all about the logistics of getting the moles to dig the right holes and get the right pipes and cables into the right places and all covered up before more rain comes along to flood them again.
The problem with clay is that after a big downpour the water doesn’t go anywhere fast, and so the much-larger-than-needed hole for one of the tanks (our fault apparently!) was transformed.
I commended Sr Manuel on a nossa nova piscina as we finally had a swimming pool deep enough to jump into...and weeks before we expected it!
At least the lake benefitted from all the water being pumped out and down the hill – we are getting some good rain this winter, interspaced with nice sunny days.
But as I write the rain is falling again and the moles have knocked it on the head for the day…or maybe the week.
I can’t possibly wish for less rain…only that it falls on days when we’re not digging massive trenches!
It’s the interiors which are taking most of our time right now – trying to decide on the right sofas, furniture and finishings for all the rooms.
We’re thinking of something along the lines of this new place which has opened up in Alentejo a little north of us:
The houses aren’t sealed yet as our almighty row with the unpolished concrete company continues.
They asked us to pay, we asked them to come out and explain how they’re going to sort out our “50 shades of yellow” floor issue. Watch this space.
Doors and windows will only arrive when they are finished...whenever that may be...but I suppose it’s better than them arriving un-finished.
I’m imagining Santa’s little helpers already bored with dry January and trying to recreate the adrenaline of the rush before Christmas by offering to help put them all together while singing jolly songs.
It may be a different scenario at the PVC place in Cercal, but that’s what I will keep imagining for now.
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We had a whistle-stop trip to Lagos in the Algarve to visit the IKEA design studio in a supermarket and finally pin down the apartment kitchens.
I’m not saying we’ve been there a lot, but Adriana the very patient and helpful designer recognised us and our project straight away.
We tried to design the restaurant kitchen at IKEA as well, but rules suggest we will need everything to be in stainless steel – or Inox as it’s known here – and IKEA only have limited choices.
Our pals Richard and Pauline run a fantastic restaurant in Carvoeiro called Earth Shop & Café and have been advising us.
One of their best suggestions so far is a German company that delivers stainless steel kitchenware for half the price we can buy it second-hand in Portugal (why is it so expensive here?).
So we’re shopping online for extractor hoods, ovens, sinks and inox furniture...trying desperately to keep control of the budget.
As the moles will soon (hopefully) be heading down the hill towards us, I’d like to renew our appeal for help to get everything finished this Spring.
We’ve already had a few folk fill in the form expressing an interest in lending a hand in exchange for a bed and digestibles.
But if you know anyone who might be able to help at some point in February, March or April, we have some specific projects which will need some willing and able hands.
Thank you for reading Off-grid and Ignorant in Portugal. We need help, so please share it.
Top of the list are a shipping container conversion, an entrance wall, a bit of click flooring and a load of landscaping.
Please spread the word (and the love). Here’s the link to the Google Form. Thanks!
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While I’m not really the New Year’s resolution type, I do like using the ticking over of another number to reflect on the 12 months past and ponder the year that’s yet to come.
I’ve scattered the last despatch of 2023 with some of the most viewed posts of the year for some tough - and some not so tough - reflection.
In the words of this blog from exactly a year ago:
“We will plant our trees, landscape our valley, launch our wines podcast, design and finish our interiors, build our water and power infrastructure and finally (hopefully) understand heatpumps.”
Not so many of those have made it to the ta-da list.
All the very best for 2024! Thanks so much for supporting us and please share this blog with a friend.
We planted 46 olive trees in hardened clay (thanks Dom) and nurtured them through the summer with fiddly drip irrigation, then after the rain planted 200 more in a vast hedge in half the time.
We struck water, but it was salty water; but then we struck lucky and scored a connection to an irrigation canal and something to dilute our salty water with.
There were highs and there were lows: the blog Hitting the Wall prompted a huge response and so many wonderful and kind words…and it led a week later to a reflection entitled Don’t stop this train. Thanks to you all.
We have been blessed by so many fabulous friends visiting us this year...thank you all for your support, your enthusiasm for what we’re doing, and for helping us to dream big...come again soon!
Stress levels peaked and troughed roughly in line with the appearance or otherwise of our largely unpolished concrete people.
The infrastructure is a work in progress, heat pumps remain a mystery, but above all we took big steps towards finishing our construction work largely on time and only slightly over budget.
And with the help of a Christmas surge, the podcast is progressing well and we are planning the 2024 roll-out of episodes very soon. You’ll find it here.
Here’s a piece I did for Monocle Radio on a show called The Entrepreneurs which features a favourite story...the trend of talha, or amphora wines in Alentejo.
In the year ahead our biggest fear is bureaucracy and the damage long delays to licensing could cause.
We need money coming in and so our top priority is to stay ahead of the curve, sort the paperwork early and get everything submitted as soon as we can. The big digging continues, starting as it did with The Rise of the Machines in September.
Landscaping is also going to be a challenge...once the building ends we will have large areas to plant and pimp up.
And as we accelerate towards opening, we have to budget everything extremely carefully as we invest in interiors and exteriors but keep a close eye on not running out of money!
Pondering the year ahead, there are a lot of things I didn’t expect to be doing in my life, and I expect that list is only going to grow in 2024. Here are a few of them:
1. I never intended to be an expert on off-grid living. I say “expert,” but the proof of the power will be in the heating.
Too many heat pumps can most certainly spoil the plot.
The nerve-wracking moment will be when all the buildings are finished, the appliances are all plugged in and we find out whether my Excel sheet of estimated electrical demand is matched by the actual supply of solar power.
Until that proves (as it most likely will) to be terrifyingly mismatched, I am peddling myself as an expert – at least for the purposes of a two-part radio series on the BBC World Service.
Please tune in on New Year’s Day to hear our neighbours Daniel, Medronho Jorge and Ola & Merete explaining why they decided to off-grid in Portugal.
(Thanks so much for being willing victims guys!)
And on Tuesday 2nd you’ll hear from Water Rui and Solar Iain – folks that regular readers will already know – as we ponder the challenges of scaling up an off-grid system to a higher-end eco-luxe lodge.
(Do you like that? “Eco-Luxe” – Ana came up with it and I think it’s brilliant).
And given that we’ll all probably be doing something else at 8am GMT on January 1st it’ll all be on the Business Daily podcast once it’s broadcast.
And I’ll be spending the first couple of days of 2024 with a clutch of colourful Sharpies and some acetate sheets creating layers of electrical wire and water pipe maps to superimpose on a landscape map to help the builder get the right things connected in the right places.
2. I never intended to have three cats and three dogs – it is clearly excessive – but I still don’t feel we’ve reached peak animal.
Albert (aka Albie, aka LB, aka LBD, aka Little Black Dog) – the stray with half a tail who rocked up on the building site one day and never looked back – seems to be settling nicely into his place at the bottom of the pack.
Suitably curtailed into roll-over submission every time Garfie harrumphs, he’s been accepted into the circle of canine trust even though he still doesn’t dare enter the house.
We do need to spend some time in 2024 training him up.
The kittens are neutered and fears of exponential feline growth have now abated.
Val Kilmer’s five new February arrivals sadly, but quickly were reduced to four and then down to two as we found a good home for Batcat and Jim Morrison at Quinta Camarena where they now happily harass dogs and humans in equal measure at our friends’ rural tourism lodge.
Inspired by our Christmas retreat in suitably snowy Sweden at Ana’s parent’s farm surrounded sheep – either busy in the barn, languishing in the freezer or lazing flat on the floor – we are leaning towards some ovine assistance for weed clearance and fire protection.
Ana likes the idea of donkeys, and I still dream of Vasco the Llama, but perhaps one new breed at a time is best...and maybe we should begin some paltry poultry.
Our neighbour Daniel has been master of the menagerie while we have been recharging our batteries (mostly in the dark), and I get the feeling he’s looking forward to us getting home...and that we may need to find an alternative zoo keeper for the next level of animal ownership.
3. I never thought I’d own a shipping container. I’ve rented a few as we relocated around the world in our previous lives, but owning one was never really a consideration.
Turning the yellow metal mass into an elegant water filtration station/store room/garden centre is another item on the growing to-do list of things we need help with.
It currently includes:
* Paint and insulate container
* Build roof over container
* Install doors, windows and electricity in container
* (wonder why we bought a container...because it was a lot cheaper than building a small house)
* Building an “entrance wall” to the property out of cement and stone
* Planting trees & hedges & plants
* Landscaping by spreading ground cover
* Laying cork click floors
* Building a pétanque court
And that’s without considering the usual Spring Strimming weight-loss programme, installing the water tanks and gutters and keeping the construction show on the road.
So while you ponder how much you ate and drank over the holidays and make resolutions to be more active and do things outside...please consider coming to the Valley of the Stars and helping us with some of the heavy lifting.
We have had a few volunteers stay over the last couple of years, but as we accelerate towards getting the place open enough to accept guests, February, March and April are a crucial time for us and we could really do with some help.
Ideally we need strong and willing hands, and those with experience of building, landscaping, painting, planting...all that sort of thing...so please, please, please get in touch if you’d like a workout in the Winter sun...or know anyone who might.
With any luck we should have more rooms available...and those very specific jobs in mind.
Here’s a link to a Google Form which we’ve updated, so please spread the word and you not only shed a few pounds, but help us get our eco-luxe (see, nice huh?) project over the line.
And of course as soon as we’ve learned how to build we need to learn how to run a hotel...many more school days lie ahead.
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4. I never wanted a large pile of concrete poop…and I still don’t. I do, however, hope our unpolished concrete company come back and sort out the mess they made...and that also includes some of the floors...before I out them on the blog and risk defamation. (They have, objectively, made an arse out of it).
Finally. I suppose I should finish by making some predictions of things I/we should do but probably won’t have done this year: open the eco-luxe lodge (and learn how to run), learn how to plan and plant a vineyard, think about podcast series two, get better at Portuguese (free classes continue) and start some doing some live storytelling…around wine.
ALL THE VERY BEST FOR THE NEW YEAR!!...and we hope to see many of you in 2024!
Al & Ana
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Hasn’t that last week before Christmas been such a rush to get things done?
Writing cards, last minute shopping, bulldozing holes, lowering septic tanks and digging pipe ditches.
It’s just one thing after another, eh?
That familiar shovelling of freshly fallen sand to make sure the tanks are level, spaying a few kittens, and writing letters to Santa asking him to bring us doors and windows for the new buildings as soon as he possibly can after the festive rush...please...that kind of thing.
But the typical Christmas morning scene of a dad struggling to construct that amazing but flat-packed gift before the kids get bored with it, came early for me this year with a solar water pump kit.
It was an exciting present to unwrap: there was a wooden box to prize open – with a cardboard box inside – and lots of solar panels and metal struts to play with...and loads of strange looking pieces.
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Imagine Ikea meeting Meccano with the extra excitement of live electricity...but with no instructions. What could possibly go wrong?
Despite the common grumble “there’s obviously a piece missing” there were actually a couple of pieces missing.
That’s one thing to kick off my Christmas list and into the long grass until the remaining aluminium struts make it here from Spain some time in 2024.
It’s a stressful time for everyone, but I think we hit peak stress on the shortest day of the year...or perhaps I should call it the longest night.
Last week’s Bad Day rolled into a week and seemingly unresolvable problems started piling up.
Bureaucracy, a bloody-minded builder and the continuing saga of the unpolished concrete people (and their poop) generated the majority of the hassle, but there were plenty of other things besides.
We had grand plans to take the black plastic covers off the Big Bar on the hill and serve mulled wine to the neighbours while talking them through our building project, but we had to bail out of that one as our Christmas to-do list overtook everything else.
Getting the kittens done was a high priority because there are a lot of storks around here (if you know what I’m saying) and we had the jitters about two new litters courtesy of Senhor S. Claus and his delivery.
We took them down to the Algarve where that kind of thing is a lot cheaper, but then achieved very little during our race around the shops except for a nice lunch and for Ana to lose spectacularly at Wham-ageddon (I mean it was a particularly tough year to get through the whole festive season without hearing Last Christmas at least once).
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We did manage to pick up a few gifts for our favourite workers and the best present ever for our neighbour Daniel.
Daniel loves wine in a box – and there are some great box wines in Portugal – but none of us had ever seen anything like this before.
It was a TWENTY LITRE box of Amália red (named after Amália Rodrigues, the famous Portuguese fado singer), and as Daniel’s eyes widened, we insisted this wasn’t some sort of Christmas challenge.
Sr Manuel the contractor received a bottle of Comendador (meaning commander...we felt it was appropriate).
Last year we gave our builder Justo a bottle of good red wine and he thanked us, saying he didn’t really like red wine and preferred to drink medronho, the powerful locally-made firewater.
This year we got him some whisky for a change. He thanked us, saying he didn’t really like whisky, but loved medronho.
Next year I suppose we’ll get him some medronho, but then he probably only really likes his own medronho.
Ana explained it was my dad’s favourite tipple and we suggested he try it with water com or sem gas, but it’ll probably go in the cupboard with last year’s red wine.
With everything very much getting on top of us and time fast running out, we were delighted to accept a lunch invitation from friends Niels and Sybille to deliver some of Mauro and Rita’s amazing wine we’d agreed to carrier-pigeon for them from Lisbon.
It was a “quick lunch” but what an amazing lunch. Wild boar cured ham followed by pulled wild boar sandwiches with homemade sauces, home-brewed beer and hand-crafted wine were just the antidotes we needed to survive the shortest day and prepare us for the longest night.
We’ve slipped into the annual pattern of heading early to bed with the darkness closing in, and early to rise with some spectacular sunrises.
(Although I must say we are lucky in southern Europe to have more sunshine than those up here in the north).
Exercise has taken a bit of a back seat, which also contributes to the stress of course...but we did manage a walk to see this year’s display of daisies.
We had far more luck getting Simon the Hollywood dog to pose among them than we did with Garfunkel, who just didn’t understand that we wanted to feature him on our Christmas greetings card.
Herding the cats was never going to work, so we decided it wouldn’t be fair on the others for Simon to take all the glory, so this is what we decided on...
Yes, that’s blue sky; yes, it’s been 17 or 18C (and perhaps a little more) all week; and yes, this is the nearest we’ll get to a white Christmas in the Valley of the Stars.
But in Sweden to see Ana’s family and for more...erm...cosier times...amid the darkness, the cold and the crisp, shiny white snow…for now at least.
It’ll be a nice change to enjoy a northern European winter and we’ll be back soon enough to relieve Daniel of his animal sitting duties and to see in the New Year with some sunshine.
The shortest day/longest night was probably the lowest point of our year, but it’s only going to get lighter from here on in...and that’s a lovely thought to ponder over some pickled herring, as the building site falls silent and the digging machines all go to sleep.
I do hope Father Christmas brings you what you asked for – whether it’s doors & windows or a build your own solar pump with instructions manuals in clearer Spanish.
We’ve certainly got large enough chimneys for the big fella to climb down next year, but for now:
May your days be merry and bright,
And may all your water tanks be right…
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AND FINALLY...with a nod towards Shane McGowan (RIP), here’s the Portuguese version of the Pogues song Fiesta...courtesy of Despe e siga from 1994.
For those non-Portuguese-speaking listeners, Casal Garcia is a well-known brand of affordable vinho verde wine...
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Sitting on the sofa chatting through the best place we could build a car park, we knew it was going to be a crazy day.
But after slurping down a mug of coffee and heading up the hill a little after 8.15am we had no idea of the level chaos that was already enveloping our building site.
We arrived to find a shipping container semi-suspended from the bucket of a huge bulldozer, one end pile-driven into the ground, the other scraping the edge of the mountain of dried cement known locally as the concrete poop.
I immediately went into “I told you so” mode.
Having spent the last week trying to get someone from the digger company to come out first to have a look and plan what to do I immediately went for our engineer José: “I knew this would happen – it’s like a slow motion car crash,” I wailed.
He shrugged, heads were scratched and a plan was hatched.
“They’ll find a solution,” he said calmly. “Things are done differently in Portugal from what you’re used to.”
I’m not really used to anything, having never built any houses, moved any large metal boxes or guided any diggers, I just thought planning was the right thing to do...but José is usually right and watches our back.
I was frantic, stressed and manic. Ana was the voice of calm.
Just as we were fretting about the container – and the increasing cost of unplanned machine hours – a cement mixer arrived and had to squeeze past the bulldozer.
It was the final day of the Nightmare Polished Concrete Floor Job Before Christmas...and at least the mixer had arrived and had the confidence to drive through the mud.
The polished concrete guys have been anything but polished, and immediately started shouting about how they had to work the night before in the dark because there was no electricity.
There is power, they just didn’t ask where the socket was...but at least that provided an explanation for how wrongly they’d coloured the floors: they had done it in the dark.
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They started work on November 7th, got stuck in the mud reversing the cement mixer too close to the house to save them wheeling it, and then had an industrial dispute with management which culminated in dumping about 30 tonnes of cement on our land (the aforementioned concrete poop).
Then the company ghosted us for a fortnight, dropped by for one day only to do a couple of floors before disappearing again amid excuses about a national concrete shortage.
They were never seen again until this week when we pointed out the Fifty Shades of Yellow that now covered our supposedly uniform “gr-eige” floors – each relating to a different team using a different percentage of colour on a different occasion.
But then we had to travel to Lisbon for a bank meeting and they were left unaccompanied on the building site.
We’d missed the sight of the large concrete pump arriving and doing all the outside decks in one day (why couldn’t they have done that weeks ago?), and apart from the different colours it seemed to have generally gone OK.
As we watched them shovelling concrete on top of the metal reinforcing grids (rather than placing the grids inside the hardening mass) and we fretted about whether they’d remembered to add the underfloor heating liquid, the doors and windows guy arrived.
He was wanting final confirmation of every PVC unit and I was battling to understand his Portuguese.
On the other side of the building site the bulldozer was now moving concrete slabs, lifting the workers’ cabin and having another go at placing the 40 foot shipping container on the four concrete feet built for the purpose.
We’d stopped it just before the tracked monster had taken a short cut across the “future vineyard” which we had seeded and turned over at great cost and effort a few weeks ago and had been delighted to see the green shoots now emerging.
Then the leader of the Un-polished Pratts started shouting at José for something else as his phone kept ringing.
Amid the madness Ana was preoccupied on her phone desperately trying to give directions to a delivery truck driver bringing us a solar pump kit from Spain.
I didn’t know where to turn. Everything was out of control, everything was happening at once and then Ana said I had to drop everything and drive to the main road to meet the delivery van and guide him in.
I got into the car, shut the door and enjoyed a precious moment of calm.
Google maps take delivery drivers up impossible hills – which is why we have a series of signposts guiding visitors to our door – but meeting at the road is the best way to guarantee they don’t give up and tell the office “they weren’t in.”
The only way the 200kg pallet of solar panels, metal frames and a powerful water pump will make it down the valley is on the back of our trailer slowly towed behind the 4x4, so I helped the guy deliver it directly onto the trailer.
All went smoothly, and while I had been preoccupied the container had been placed and the bulldozer had started task two: levelling ground and digging holes for the water treatment tanks and reed beds.
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As I headed back up towards the chaos on the building site and looked across the valley I saw the excavator excavating in the wrong place...and raced up the hill to try and stop them.
Much as we’d like to make a point about how all our water waste is recycled we really don’t want the reed bed septic tank to be the first thing people look at when they walk onto their balcony and take in the view.
It was too high up on the hill, which was strange because we’d walked it and talked it with Sr Manuel and Rui the water guy – and even pegged out the place with wooden stakes.
By the time we arrived to redirect the digger we already had a 3m x 20m chunk taken out of the hillside.
As both the focus of attention and the digger moved down the hill, we pondered the possibilities of an accidentally created new hillside deck and seating area.
We watched nervously as Sr Manuel referred to a printed-out scan of dimensions and Joaquim the 76 year old builder was jumping in and out of the holes with a tape measure and a spirit level making sure the depths were correct as the giant bucket swung soil between pine trees.
Suddenly the bulldozer engine cut, work stopped and the cheerful guy at the wheel shouted almoçar and everything went quiet for lunch.
Somehow we had made it through the morning.
After inhaling a couple of fried eggs we picked up our recently-returned neighbour Daniel –to show him where his water is now supposed to come from and to try and work out why it wasn’t coming from there anymore and had stopped filling our new pillow tank.
Turning a few taps on and off, way down the valley, somehow did the trick.
With after lunch work stopped by a faulty hydraulic pipe on the digger and concrete polishing proceeding apace, we felt comfortable enough to abandon the site and head to the town hall to submit some documents and then travel out to the PVC guy’s workshop just to go over all the things he’d said earlier in the day which we hadn’t really understood amid the chaos.
When we got back the bulldozer was still stranded with one final job remaining, Carlos the landscaper had brought his small digger ready for a pipe burying job the next day. And I had a beer.
Ana and I made for the sofa, put on a film and tried to reconnect with Garfunkel – the big dog – who still hadn’t forgiven us for going to Lisbon for a few days and taking Simon.
The little LA dog loves the city and had a wonderful time sniffing every tree and lamppost.
“You would have hated it Garfie,” we tried to explain and I think he understood.
“It’s just too busy and crazy and hectic in the city...and here it’s...calm and...quiet and, erm, relaxed...”
Now, where should we put that car park?
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With a thousand and one things to do, a deadline always helps sort the wheat from the chaff – or the wheat from the oats as it would turn out.
An incoming Atlantic storm to break the sunshine of St Martin’s Summer provided the necessary motivation to get us out onto the land and tick things off before it all turned to a thick claggy clay mud.
We knew rain would come and there were certain things that needed to be done before it did, but it was only when our weather app started giving us some meaty millimetre rainfall predictions that we snapped into action.
Two weeks of warm and sunny weather had dried out our building site beautifully – the perfect time for our shipping container and would-be water filtration house to be delivered and the cement mixers to return so the polished concrete floor guys could finish the job they had dramatically stopped by way of a large concrete poop.
But of course they waited until the weather was upon us before making an albeit fleeting appearance: “roll up, roll up: get yer concrete while it lasts – one day only.”
It was nice of them to drop by, but the problem with doing six indoor floors and six outside decks in small batches is the inconsistency in the amount of colour they spread and therefore the finished hue.
And doing shower areas and bathrooms separately – with weeks in between – does inevitably result in multicoloured floors...which really weren’t as advertised in the brochure.
We’ll work around it, but it’s very frustrating.
Ana came up with a new version of the three letter acronym “AWA” which some readers may recognise and relate to. It’s: “Alentejo Wins Again.”
Whatever you do, however you prepare, however you balance pushing not to hard or too softly, Alentejo is going to win...it’s just a matter of understanding that and going with the flow...which is sometimes easier said than done.
We’re lucky that our building work is not being delayed by their absence, which is apparently due to a shortage of cement in southern Portugal...for reasons so far unexplained.
Our contractor Sr Manuel and his fabulous builders Justo and Joaquim are just cracking on and getting stuff done while the window guy and the carpenter work tirelessly (presumably) on preparing all our fittings for fitting.
This week they’ve been doing a load of digging – cutting the first of three cross-property trenches to move water, waste and electricity between the houses and to where it needs to be.
We’ll be collecting all our rainwater runoff to store in a 200,000 litre pillow tank, and have ordered the biological waste water treatment system, and so the guys have been using levelling lasers to dig a trench at the correct angle to bring everything down the hill.
They added some French drains to soak up some of the surface water which will sink through the gravel around the houses, but sitting as we are on a hilltop of clay, we will need even more creative ways of helping the water run off during high rainfall winters.
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With landscaping a top priority we had to take advantage of this year’s last opportunity to get things into the ground before we (hopefully) open.
We’ll have one more chance to pretty things up in February/March, but the perfect time to plant cover crops is after one big rain has soaked into the ground nicely and another one is on the way.
With storm clouds forecast we headed for the hills – of Monchique mountain in the Algarve – to buy some more olive trees to plant.
“How many would you like?” asked the nice chap at our favourite nursery Viveiro Dinis.
“How many can we get in the trailer?” Ana replied, expecting that we’d need a couple of trips to transport the 200 olive saplings we’d decided to plant as a hedge to surround our land.
It turns out he could have packed 500 in there, and so we bounced the trailer back to the Valley with the whole batch of 200 small trees and a load of work ahead of us.
It’s more difficult than you might think to find a load of old s**t on social media – especially nearby manure or estrume as it’s known here – but after many hours of searching, Ana stumbled upon a large local stash of 18 month old horse dung ready to help our olive hedge establish itself.
Another trailer trip later and we had everything we needed to start digging holes and planting the trees about a metre or so apart.
If we thought that was backbreaking work it had nothing on the cover-crop seeding of the area referred to as “the future vineyard.”
We’ve had a couple of fantastic viticulturist consultants come and visit and spoke to Dorina Lindemann who runs Plansel, selling and preparing grapevine plants and making wine.
We visited her for the soon-to-be-released wine podcast and I wrote an article about the process of grafting grape varietals onto root stock...and why you do it.
We’re hoping to plant in March 2025 as there’s just too much else going on right now to have the headspace for the research we need to do, but we can plant a mix of cereals and legumes to provide some organic material and fix some nitrogen in the soil.
With some help we ordered seed from the local agricultural supplies shop and had to mix the wheat with the oats...and everything else. This is what we ended up with:
Trigo and aveia forrageiro (fodder wheat and oats), ervilhaca granel (bulk vetch), tremocilha raiada (striped lupin), trevo subterrâneo dalkeith (clover), sementa relva prado florido (flowering grass seed) and tremoço reginal (local lupins).
As a student studying Irish historical geography I obsessed over one particularly down-beat film called The Field starring Richard Harris.
His character Bull McCabe has a deep attachment to the patch of land in the title: “which his family has cultivated and improved, from barren to now very productive, over a number of generations.”
I remembered his obsession with removing all the rocks and carrying seaweed over the mountain to make it the most wonderfully lush green field you could imagine.
I was channelling my inner Bull McCabe as I dug rocks out of the soft clay and hurled them into piles – imagining how wonderful our field could be one day.
Our topsoil is mostly good, but we turned over quite a bit of clay in some sections while burying the old eucalyptus roots and I’m concerned little will grow there.
Ana praised my dedication and ambition to hoe and dig out rocks from a third of a hectare of land, but firmly questioned the timeline, my blind stubbornness and the mismatch between intention and reality...the rain was approaching and the seeds needed to be sewn that day.
I suppose the rocks (let alone the seaweed) will have to wait...it was another day of tough and backbreaking spadework.
We also needed to bury the first of our water tanks in the bottom of the valley. Carlos the landscaper had kindly dug the 2.6m deep hole, but had work elsewhere so we had to lower it by hand, get it level and then backfill many cubic metres of soil.
With the help of long straps, the car and the friendly Moldovans building our neighbour Daniel’s new patio, we managed to get the tank into the hole, but there was much more to be done to stop it from floating out in the rain.
Hours of even more backbreaking work later, we had filled as much as we could before the rain arrived...now the sun is shining again at some point I’ll venture down through the mud to see whether we were successful.
And the shipping container? It arrived, but the guy couldn’t lift it onto our new concrete supports because of the wet ground...so it’s just been parked next to the concrete poop for now...until it’s dry enough to get a crane in and place it properly.
Ah well, AWA.
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Our path of life is a little treacherous – steep and with lots of places to slip and fall – but the further we go down it, the smaller the drop becomes and the less chance we have of plunging to our deaths.
The recent rain has slid in some complications – as I wrote about last week – but the route is still navigable and we’re confident that reaching the destination is worth the difficult journey.
And thanks to St Martin, this week we took this metaphor literally, packed a picnic and scrambled a tricky track down the cliffs to the beach to enjoy some warm weather and a dip in the ocean before colder weather comes along.
Verão de São Martinho – St Martin’s Summer – arrives in mid-November and is fast becoming one of our favourite times of year.
It’s when the talha amphorae are opened and the first new wines of the year begin to trickle out, when chestnuts are ready to be roasted, and when temperatures in the mid-20s give us the chance to gloat (just a little) about where we live and why we’re doing all this.
I’ve written before about St Martin’s progression from plain old Hungarian Martin, to patron saint of the poor, of tailors, winemakers and curiously both soldiers and conscientious objectors. Oh, and of France.
There’s a Portuguese saying “esta é a minha praia” – meaning that’s my beach, but also “that’s my thing” – and this is definitely our beach.
We call it “The Birthday Beach,” and it’s one of the most beautiful spots along this wonderfully wild coast – if not always the easiest to access.
Ana dusted off her summer sandwich making skills, Daniel threw in some hot tamales and after a sip of beer and a glass of wine we dived into the waves and all agreed the water really wasn’t cold...although we didn’t linger too long.
For the dogs it was the end of an excellent week as Simon celebrated his 12th birthday and Garfunkel enjoyed their joint celebration through meats, treats, some dried chicken and a lot of fussing.
And it was also a great week for us that began in Vila de Frades with a feast of wine tastings, fabulous food, music and friends...and ended with water...coming out of a tap...at the bottom of the valley.
We love inland Alentejo and it was only the coastal climate and of course the beaches that kept us from moving to the winelands when we first drew a line around Alentejo to choose our new home.
We’d been planning the two-hour trip to the November 11th opening of the talhas wine weekend since November 12th last year and this time managed to persuade our friends Niels and Sybille to join us.
Talha wine has its own official classification in Portugal and to qualify it has to stay in its fermenting clay pots until St Martin’s Day.
That’s when the celebrations begin – the taps are hammered in, the songs are sung, the chestnuts (and the pigs) are roasted and the wines are sampled.
And boy were they sampled.
Thanks to the amazing Mauro Azóia and Rita – and the generosity of Hamilton Reis, the guys from XXVI Talhas and the ROCIM Amphora Day we had the most wonderful weekend.
There’s an amazing energy among Portugal’s winemakers and we were lucky to dip into it for a weekend and meet many of the industry’s powerhouses like Hugo Mendes, Gonçalo Patraquim, Mariana Siqueira and many more from Portugal the US, UK and beyond.
Niels showcased his Syrah to the delight of visiting American wine journalists and somehow we both managed to get interviewed for Portuguese telly.
But our adventure to Cuba, Vila de Frades, Vidigueira and Vila Alva began by visiting a weaving mill to choose the oversized headboards for the new lodge bedrooms.
We’ve been to Fabricaal a few times to watch the traditional looms in action, ponder what to order, and also to record for the podcast, but this was the “now we know what we want” pressure trip.
Ana’s eye for colour and style took the lead and I think we have chosen well.
We book-ended the weekend with an amazing late lunch at Quinta de Quetzal and then dipped into Justino Damas Winery where we stumbled across some traditional Cante Alentejano singing last year.
The guys seemed to be winding down after a hectic weekend, but when Ana played them the video she’d filmed last year, they sparked straight up into song again...next thing passers-by were joining in and it was a proper song-off.
I even joined in...albeit a little timidly...
But it’s not been all fine wines and song this week...we also used the good weather to get in amongst it and push a couple of neglected parts of our project.
Not surprisingly there was no sign of the polished concrete floor guys who’d abandoned ship over a labour dispute, but we are reliably informed they will be back in another week to finish the job and clean up the concrete poop/art installation.
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Whilst awaiting their return we focussed on water.
With 6km of plastic pipes delivered from the factory Christiano Santos and his brother Eduardo, turned up to lay a couple of kilometres from the irrigation canal to the bottom of the valley where gravity just about provides it.
They wanted to run pipes along the river, but I thought the bank would be a better option, so got up nice and early to strim down some brambles and make a path for them to run routes for both us and our neighbour Daniel.
It all happened a bit quicker than we expected...and a bit too quickly for us to give timely heads up to the neighbours who were gracious about our lack of communication.
There’s something wonderfully reassuring about having a pipe at the bottom of the valley with a tap to turn on water...one small step for Christiano, but one huge leap for our kind.
Our “dilution over treatment” approach to turning mineral-salted water into drinking water involves two 200,000 litre pillow tanks – one for the canal water and the other for rainwater which we’ll collect.
That involves levelling two 180m2 areas and laying 10cm of sand on top before the pillow tanks can be installed...it also involves putting in other tanks for collecting and pumping the water up the hill.
Enter Charles Days (aka Carlos Dias) with his digger and levelling laser...and apart from being excellently distracted working wonders on Daniel’s land, everything is just about ready.
An expensive week of paying for tanks and pipes pushed me to go through the finances again to make sure all is well.
Surprisingly things are still broadly on track and on budget...barring the occasional surprise from the builder to give us something to argue about this week.
St Martin’s Summer has dried the building site up nicely – let’s hope the concrete guys can come back before the forecast changes.
But the path is still slippy and treacherous in places...and no doubt there are plenty of potholes a little further down the road, but we’re still heading broadly in the right direction.
Life in Portugal is definitely our beach. Especially when we’re on our beach.
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