Alentejo

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As you may have noticed by now, I am quite a big fan of the Alentejo region of Portugal. South of the Tagus river (Tejo) but before you get to the southern most coast, this part of the country is typified by olive trees and cork oaks, vineyards and tiny sunbleached villages. I love it here and visit as often as possible (except for during the peak of the summer, when the heat is unbearable). These are a few iPhone photos from the last year or so of visits…  Barragem da Alqueva Évora  Alcaçovas Casa Branca

Évora, Alentejo

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The first time I visited Évora was back in 2007 and I fell in love with the city immediately… so much so that we were even talking about maybe living there once we decided to settle in Portugal. But then the second time I visited was in the peak of the summer, and I quickly changed my mind. The city is incredibly beautiful, yes… but 40 degree heat and absolutely no cooling breeze for 2 months of the year… not to mention the fact that it´s a bit far from the coast, is all too much for this wind and ocean loving…

Quiche

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It´s about early spring, sunshine on the balcony, lazy days with good friends, flaky pastry, smokey bacon, guitar riffs wafting in on the breeze, dirty dishes that someone else will wash up… hopefully… otherwise, who cares? They can stay there until tomorrow.

Ilha do Farol

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Our good friends Matt & Lena live down in the Algarve region of Portugal, about 3 hours drive from us in Ericeira… so whenever we have an empty week or two on our calendar (and the weather is playing along) we pile into the car for a mini-roadtrip down south and spend some time with them.  And because I can´t sit still for longer than 10 minutes without wanting to explore somewhere, I always have a few places on my list of “things to see” whenever we´re in an unfamiliar part of the country… this time around it was the…

travel photography portugal

Autumn Road-trip – Serra da Estrela

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After we left the Monsanto region we travelled further north to the Serra da Estrela. We´d been sort-of hoping to catch a bit of snow but since it hadn´t yet started we weren´t really expecting it… and as it turns out, the first snows fell the night after we´d left… bad timing! But I´m also not sure how much fun it would have been to be in a tiny tent in the snow anyway, so I guess everything happens for a reason. The autumn colours got more and more vivid the higher into the mountains we went, and we became…

travel photography monsanto, central portugal

Autumn Road-trip – Monsanto

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Last November, a few weeks before we left to spend Christmas in South Africa we went on a very spur-of-the-moment camping trip in central Portugal and the Serra da Estrela. I´d been wanting to explore this part of Portugal for ages, particularly the town of Monsanto and it´s little houses built into the boulder strewn hillside… it looked like something out of a fairytale and I really wanted to see it for myself. And so, while checking the weather report one day (I´m a total nerd for weather reports) I saw that we had a full week of sunny days…

Porto

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Shortly after we returned from South Africa, and before the post-summer-holiday-mid-winter-blues could set in, we squeezed into a small car with a videographer, a photographer and a DJ for an adventure up north in Porto. You can read more about the who/where/why over here but these are just a few quick shots from our weekend in this beautiful capital of the north. We keep saying that we’re going to spend more time here, to get to know the city a bit better… but then again we keep saying a lot of things, like how we’re going to go to South America,…

herdade do freixo do meio

Herdade do Freixo do Meio

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I am 100% a warm weather person… I don´t like to be cold and more than 4 days of consecutive rain is guaranteed to drive me completely crazy. But having said that, I really like autumn and I think, photographically speaking, it might just be my favourite time of year. The jury´s still out on that one, because summer is pretty awesome, but there´s just something about the colours and the light of autumn… In November last year we visited the Herdade do Freixo do Meio for their annual “Encontro do Outono” or Autumn Meet-up. The Herdade is an organic farm…

travel photography portugal

Goodbye summer…

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This is pretty much my summer in a nutshell… there was lots of beach and delicious sunsets, quite a bit of sangria, an enormous amount of figs, Lisbon festivals in June, quite a bit of camping, seafood, more figs, more beach, Serra da Estrela, Algarve, Alentejo, more sangria and lots and lots of dogwalking. In between all of this there were 21 weddings and countless other shoots and  things… and the fact that the rain in Spain does NOT stay mainly on the plain, but you already heard about that… It was a good summer, but now it´s almost over. But that´s…

Serra da estrela, travelling in portugal, central portugal

Serra da Estrela

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August is the month is which literally the whole country goes on holiday. And because we live in a seaside town which also happens to be one of the most fabulous place in the country, it means that everybody comes here for the holidays… August in Ericeira is to be avoided, as much as possible. So when the crowds descend upon our beaches with screaming children and pressure cookers full of garlicky bean stew for lunch, stinking up everything in a 30 meter radius, we head inland to the mountains and the rivers… less pressure cookers, more relaxation. We camped…