Harness beauty, exploit, destroy

David Sherman

Nate was a friend of my parents. A printer by trade, he answered an ad in what used to be the classifieds in what used to be a newspaper. He stopped running presses to teach high school students the trade of running presses in Montreal’s West Island.

It was a long commute. Traffic plagued. But one Valium in the morning and one for the ride back kept him chill.

He enjoyed a laugh, had no patience for fools and less for capitalism and a love for good food, especially Chinatown’s offerings. His shirts wore out at the bottom of his rib cage from the pressure of the steering wheel against his belly during his daily drive to teach his trade and, knowing Nate, trade-union politics. Printers and unions were early partners in the war between tradesmen and the people who paid their salaries and the earliest casualties of the digital age

As a teenager, I loved his visits to my folks’ place. He was an old commie from Winnipeg with tales of strikes gone by, Tommy Douglas, the Winnipeg riots and the politics of the day. I liked to listen. He planted seeds.

He lost his wife, lived with his son and spent summers in a cottage not far from where I live now. My parents’ lives went sideways, but Nate and I indulged shared passions for politics and Chinese feasts. I visited the occasional summer weekend to his Laurentian cottage to spend a cool night, have a swim in the pond, play cards and reflect on the rulers of the day.

Nate retired from teaching kids the facts of life. He loved to spend winters in a far-off place called Albufeira. To him, it was Paradise. An empty village, friendly climate with a long beach and cheap fresh fish, grass-raised beef and free-ranging chicken.

Must’ve taken a bit of soul searching. Portugal was under the thumb of a fascist dictator who plundered African colonies as well as his own country. But, by a certain age, Nate realized he couldn’t change the world and still enjoy it.

When I hit 30, give or take, he stopped going. He remembered the days, he said, when he could walk to the beach and see not a soul. Now, the tourists had invaded, Albufeira was destroyed, he said. He stayed home to shoot pool daily with a bunch of seniors in Montreal.

A few years later, I followed his footsteps to Lisbon and Albufeira. Found the latter a quaint village, the beach spotted with overturned fishing dinghies and waves for body surfing. And people on the beach. Seemed lovely to me. Lisbon less so.

The Carnation Revolution had the military replace the dictatorship with a democracy without firing a shot, supporters planting carnations in the barrels of their guns. It’s been a democracy ever since, though, on my first visit 87 decades ago, it was a quiet, tired town, the Promised Land only in the film Casablanca – “Where they wait and wait and wait” for those trying to escape Nazi Germany via Morocco.

A few hundred decades later, Reisa and I returned to Albufeira. Someone back home rented us their house there. It was unheated, uninsulated, damp and cold as hell in a community that resembled Dollard des Ormeaux with a bit of the ugliest parts of Miami Beach stirred in. Where once was a placid beach was now a shopping plaza filled with trinkets and bobbles, bags and “British food with British ingredients.”

To facilitate access to the massacred beauty, they put in an escalator down to the beach. Sometimes it worked.

At our first meal at the bottom of the escalator, we met a table of Brits who were having “drunch,” or liquid brunch. They came by Ryanair for a cheap weekend of drinking. To them Albufeira was a cheap pub.

The Portuguese owner of a small Portuguese restaurant said, “the Algarve is dead.”

Chilled, disgusted, burnt several times by booking.com and the like, I grabbed this weird document called a map, a maze of lines and shapes and colours on paper and headed straight south down the N125 to the end of the road – Sagres.

Centuries earlier it had been called “The End of the World,” a land of tall limestone cliffs  growing out of the ocean since before time began, across the sea from Africa and Portugal’s hundreds of years of colonialism.

Today it is a refuge on the Atlantic, a national park with a few B&Bs, two main roads, one supermarket, and, as a guide book rued, “No shopping or nightlife.” Perfect.

Here we found Portugal, fish and seafood plucked or trapped that day and winding roads to nowhere with one-storey homes, hidden B&Bs and hostels for surfers who can’t afford camper vans and no shortage of surf shops.

In winter, the place is dead. Roads forlorn and as empty as Nate remembered where we walk after dinner and not see a soul, the persistent sound track the ocean rolling in.

Efforts to turn it into the rest of coastal Portugal with condos and bad beach restaurants and hotels have so far failed but people keep trying.

It would seem beauty exists to be harnessed and then exploited until it is destroyed.

Our visits here are bracketed by a week’s stay in Lisbon, slowly but surely being transformed by Airbnb, skyscrapers, government incentives to attract wealth, Americans fleeing Trump, Canadians fleeing cold and people and businesses from Northern Europe and Germany seeking labour paid the lowest minimum wage in industrial Europe, pleasant climate and comparatively cheaper rents and prices.

The gap between wages and housing costs is also the largest in Europe as gentrification by foreign interests takes the city over address by address, block by block.

Each visit, we find it harder to find authentic Portuguese Tascas, simple restaurants serving original local cuisine of grilled everything and cataplanas, fish and seafood stews made in a particular copper wok-like implement with a lid.

Locals here can no longer afford to live in their own city or find a restaurant they can afford. It is not exceptional to Portugal, just extreme. English is everywhere as are throngs wearing backpacks, holding guidebooks and taking selfies.

The Algarve is dead. Lisbon belongs to the monied. Nate is probably turning in his grave.