Cellardoor Magazine: Travel Issue - Vale de Parra

Piercing white heat and dry air laced with a perfume of spice catch the back of the throat and fill your lungs with this strange place, buffeting winds carry the salt of the ocean and the smell of wild herbs and dry earth, whispers from North Africa across the sapphire sea. Scorched land is home to Carob trees and woody nightshade, succulents and champagne orchids, a cacophony of desert and woodland that unfold an allegory of African and European collision. It is this intoxicating promise of faraway places inter-woven with the reassuringly known that has meant the Algarve is no stranger to tourism. The region is named for the Arabic word al-gbarb (the west) referring to the provinces position at the western edge of the former Muslim Empire. A remaining thread of Moorish influence unravelled through Arabized-Latin tongue, fig and almond trees naturalised in a forgotten past and minarets that turn the Algarve skyline into a Lilliputian dreamscape of Islamic grandeur. Vale de Parra is one of the lesser know municipality’s that make up this idyll landscape. Whitewashed villas lie between a heath land of wild lavender and citrus trees, swallowtail butterflies flutter up from dry grass bent relenting under coastal winds and Azure-winged magpies draw circles in the cloudless sky. The hush of this unruffled existence interrupted only by the song of the cicadas and little owls that call this untouched expanse home. Under a mile away lies the Atlantic Ocean and the endless beaches that unfurl around it like a golden ribbon across a sheet of icy blue. Rust worn and sun bleached fishing boats adorn the shoreline, bringing today’s catch tangled in rope and seaweed to the nearby restaurants. The cuisine in the Algarve retains a rustic simplicity: Caldeirada (Fish Stew) infused with parsley and lemon, Queijo Serra da Estrela (sheep cheese) served with dense bread, and tortes of carob, fig and almond washed down with Port, an indulgent liquor of cherry sweetness and rich amber warmth.