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…

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…

Portugals south west wild coast, costa vicentina

Costa Vicentina – Portugal´s south west coast.

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So it seems everyone in the Northern Hemisphere is getting ready for autumn, my Instagram and Pinterest feeds are suddenly full of various pumpkin related recipes and warm woolly jerseys… but summer hasn´t yet left our part of the world and I, for one, am not in a rush for boots and jackets. So what if the days are getting shorter? It´s still warm enough to swim in the ocean and I´m quite happy being in denial, thank you very much. Here´s to summer, may you last at least another month… or two…

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Spanish North Coast road trip – Day 8

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Click here for Day 7: San Sebastian This was the last day of our rainy Spanish adventure and we didn´t really explore much since we had loads of ground to cover and not much time for anything except driving. We stopped briefly in Salamanca, which is packed with tourists in spite of the fact that it´s pretty much in the middle of nowhere… and also a tiny little town called Palenzuela where it appears they have more sheep than people… like New Zealand then, only much hotter. And so the story ends… we had a great time on this trip…

Rome in the winter.

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Rome was, of course, amazing… always is. We had a wonderful few days, just about walked ourselves to death and ate enough cheese to last a life-time… and of course took loads of photos. The first time I visited Rome I was completely blown away by the architecture, the history, the way of life… but now that I’ve been living in Europe for 3 years, this time around it didn’t seem quite so foreign. The Italian lifestyle is very similar to the Portuguese (the coffee is better but the driving is much worse, which I didn’t think was possible) and…

kerry murray travel photography portugal

Instagramming

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So I’m probably one of the last people in the whole world to get into Instagram, but here I am, finally. I resisted getting an iPhone for ages because I didn’t want to become one of “those” people… you know, the ones who are permanently glued to their phones and get that funny twitch everytime the email or facebook “pings” with a notification… but in the end I had to do it, the world moves forward, with or without me and it definitely makes my work life a whole lot easier to manage. But my favourite part is having a…

Travel photography Portugal

Castelo de Amourol

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We went on a scouting mission a while ago, look for nice locations for photo shoots and found the Castelo de Amourol, which is an ancient castle built on an island in the Tejo (Tagus) river. Parts of the castle date back to pre-Roman times… which is an insane amount of time for a building to stand in the middle of a river. Theres not much here besides the stone walls of the castle itself… no restaurants, curio shops and the usual flotsam and jetsam of the tourism trade, which adds to the mystery of the place… Portugal is so…