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ALGARVE NEWSLETTER
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Sun all weekend. That is the forecast in one line: clear skies from today to Sunday, 25 to 27 degrees, Saturday the warmest, a light breeze and a sea still at 21. It is the kind of October weekend people move here for, and most of the best of it is in the east: octopus in Santa Luzia, a hunting fair in the hills, eighty artists with their doors open in Faro. Here is what we would do with it.
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🗺️ THIS WEEKEND AT A GLANCE
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Haja Polvo: The Octopus Route · Santa Luzia, Tavira, today to Sunday, tapas €5 to €8 with a drink · Ten restaurants each serve their own octopus tapa for World Octopus Day. Pick up the €2 passport, walk the waterfront and try three or four.
XVII Partridge Fair · Martim Longo, Alcoutim, Saturday and Sunday from 10am, free · Falconry at dawn, cheese being made, game on the stove and goats milked by hand. Quim Barreiros plays the tent on Sunday at 7pm.
Open Studios Faro · Across Faro, today to Sunday, free · More than 80 artists open their studios, with work in galleries, churches and streets. Take the map and wander: it is the best excuse to see corners of Faro you never go into.
European Le Mans Series · Autódromo Internacional do Algarve, Portimão, Saturday, race at 2.30pm, from €8 · The last race of the season: four hours of prototypes and GT cars on the circuit's hills. Cheap, loud and easy to do with children.
Polly Gibbons & Algarve Jazz Orchestra · Centro Cultural de Lagos, Saturday at 7pm · A British voice somewhere between jazz, soul and gospel, in front of the region's big band. If Lagos is too far, she sings again in Lagoa next Saturday.
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✨ PREMIUM PICK OF THE WEEK
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Seven Hanging Valleys: Guided Hike With Transfers From Faro, Olhão and Albufeira
In August this trail is a hot, crowded shuffle. In October, at 25 degrees under a clear sky, it is what it is supposed to be: seven kilometres of clifftop between Praia da Marinha and Vale Centeanes, past sea arches, sinkholes, the Alfanzina lighthouse and the roof of the Benagil cave.
👉 More Info
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Menires do Lavajo: Three Stones Older Than the Pyramids
If you drive up to the Partridge Fair this weekend, add a detour. In the hills behind Alcoutim, a dirt track leaves the hamlet of Afonso Vicente and runs a kilometre and a half to a low hill, a small car park and three standing stones that were raised around 3500 BC.
The tallest is 3.14 metres of dark grey greywacke, the largest menhir of that stone known in Portugal, cut with a long groove, small hollows and circles that nobody can read any more. It was only identified in 1992. Archaeologists found the other two in pieces in 1998 and stood them up again. There is no ticket office and usually nobody else: just the stones, the rockrose hills and the wind.
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The Pot With an Arabic Name
Walk the quay in Santa Luzia this weekend and you will see them stacked by the hundred: small pots strung together on rope. This is the alcatruz, and it is one of the cleverest pieces of fishing gear ever made, because it has no hook, no net and no bait.
It works on one fact about the octopus: it wants a home. Fishermen lay long lines of pots on the seabed and leave them. An octopus finds an empty den, moves in, and tends to stay put even as the line is hauled up. The word is older than Portugal. It comes from the Arabic al-qadus, the clay bucket on a water wheel, the same kind of pot that once lifted water from Algarve wells.
Santa Luzia's men were tuna fishermen until the great tuna traps of this coast failed in the last century, and the octopus took the tuna's place. Today most pots are plastic and many boats prefer the covo, a baited trap, but the idea has not changed. One thing to remember when you order: a common octopus lives between one and two years, so the one on your plate grew from almost nothing in a season or two.
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