There's no place like a second home

David Sherman

They smile so easily. Many are quick to embrace you as they would an old friend. Share a joke, a big laugh. We come each year, not to escape the cold or bask in the monumental cliffs, stormy seas or rolling hills, green and pocked with remnants of ancient homes and forgotten lives, grazing sheep and the occasional donkey. It’s about the people we’ve gotten to know and those we barely know. People who smile and joke and laugh despite the rigours of life. On the edge of this bipolar land, once known as “the end of the world,” minimum wage is beneath poverty wage. It’s a survival salary.

Portugal is a curious country.

People work and smile in neighbourhoods they can’t afford to live, restaurants they can’t afford to eat in. We are told of people sharing rooms, sleeping side by side on floors. Living with parents in parental homes. Employers are obliged to pay 14 months of salary for 12 months of labour, though a month’s vacation is also obligatory, so it’s 14 months of poverty wages for 11 months of work. The extra two months are not taxed. It lightens the load somewhat. As do food cards some employers give, like food stamps in the U.S. Cards for groceries, not cash that might be used to pay the cable, the restaurant, the dope dealer. Cards to fuel the body, not the car.

Works hours are regulated as they are at home but most seem to have a side gig, maybe two. There is no other way to pay the rent which keeps climbing as tourists invade in increasing numbers, buying up property, jacking up rents. Airbnb gobbling apartments and housing, reducing living space for locals by as much as 20 per cent in some areas, one of the highest rates in Europe.

It's Paradise for restaurateurs from away. Cheap labour to cook and serve well-heeled tourists willing to pay three times what an authentic Portuguese tasca will charge.

But pockets of civility remain. Houses aren’t automatically flipped for profit, at least not by most of the locals. They are handed down through generations. Though, we are told, it is not uncommon to rent the homestead to vacationers during summer and charge enough to pay expenses for the rest of the year.

The young man at the B&B, 28, whose English is sung as much as spoken, lives on a spread passed down from grandparents. The B&B, once a hostel owned by his great-grandparents, is now owned by a man known as “The British gentleman.” The young man likes to be called John, works his eight hours here, part host, part encyclopedia of the region and local farming. He’s been punching in here since he was 18.

Between shifts, he runs five-acres of sheep, chicken, fruit trees and cattle, with donkeys to keep the fox at bay. His girlfriend studies nursing.

And, like many we have met in our recurring excursions to this dot on the map, he invites us to see his farm, his newborn lambs, meet his partner.

In his spare time, he helps a cousin pluck and press olives from 30 acres of olive trees.

“It helps to have a lot of cousins,” he says. “They need help, I help them. I need help, they help me. Besides it’s fun.”

He ordered a still with a few cousins for a few hundred euros to make “moonshine” or liquor, a not uncommon past time here, using figs, berries or whatever they have that pleasantly ferments.

Lore has it the town was founded by five families who obviously got to know each other pretty well. Seems everyone is everyone’s cousin.

When Sergio is not serving at the lux place across the way, natty in black pants and black sweater over white shirt, he fishes. It’s not a hobby. Teenage children, girlfriend, dogs and cats at home, he loves to be alone in a boat, hook in the water. He has his cherished spots with pictures to prove it. On a good day, he catches a dozen or more bass and bream, sells them for about 17 euros each, he says, keeps some for himself. Good days it ads 300 euros to his salary. He’s proud of his beautiful home he had built, happy to display it on his phone, rides his 60-plus year-old body to work on an electric scooter. His legs are tired from his five and a half days serving tourists and well-off locals, most of whom are not generous tippers. It is not a tipping culture. Here, 15 per cent is unheard of. Unlike home, credit card readers are not extortionate. They don’t demand tips. It’s almost like time travel.

Soon, he will hang up that black sweater and the loquacious demeanor, cleanse the smell of mullet and piri piri, aka para para, and bitoque from his pores and become the not-so-old-man-in-the sea, reeling in his retirement plan. Basking in the silence and the isolation of his 20-foot boat. He’s happiest alone on the ocean, he says. And living on the end of the world, there’s no shortage of sea.

The Hideaway or Escondidinho is aptly named, hidden at the edge of town, anchoring a dirt road that, as far as we can tell, leads to nowhere. It is two restaurants, one half brightly lit for football aficionados to sip coffee or bottled beer and stare at the screen, the other half crowded with local workers we recognize from the hotel or other restaurants. The ubiquitous frango piri piri here is 12 euros, dinner for two less than 30, or half of what it is where tourists traipse.

We were guided to this well-lit joint by Sergio who admitted the chicken here was better than his own. We became habituées when I called to make reservations for us and friends after our second visit. I asked for a table for six. The voice on the other end of the phone said, “You want your usual table?”

Portuguese hospitality. The gentleman on the other end of the line we’ve come to know as George. We laughed and when we showed up at the appointed hour, he shook my hand, put his arm on my shoulder and shared a bonhomie I have experienced in few local eateries in my lifetime, places where now the card reader is set for an 18 or 20 per cent tip to start, even at a bakery.

Today, I am raucously known here as Mr. Fish Soup. Sopa de peixe is a standard on every menu. Big ocean breeds lotsa fish and when it reaches the outer limits of freshness, it is converted to a soup that changes day to day, depending on the available fish and the quantities. Some days it is more stew than soup. Every day, every spoon brings a smile.

My staple first course was forgotten two nights in a row. No big deal, but worth a laugh. We had guests one night, a table of six, most ordered soup and mine was delivered last. George’s cohort in hospitality is Carlos Antoine. He is frisky of late, having confided he is now spending his off days with a woman after several years of loneliness.

He slowly brought the soup bowl to me with a broad smile. It was a cold, hungry, empty bowl. We all giggled and in the pass-through to the kitchen was the entire staff, looking back at me, laughing. It was a family affair. I was christened Mr. Fish Soup.

Not unlike a family-run restaurant down the main strip of town called Carlos. Carlos Miguel always has a sample to taste that doesn’t appear on the bill. Or a dinner he insists we eat because it just came in, like blue fin tuna.

“You have to try this.”

“Okay.”

His parents started the restaurant and they are there daily, his mother still spending some time in the kitchen, out of habit or for fun. The father, who founded the place, always stands when we come in and without English at his disposal, gives me a thumbs up and offers the standard Portuguese greeting, “Tudo bem?”

The restaurant is their second home. Or perhaps their first. Football is the only thing on the widescreen and, like in most emporiums, is the focus of the lone eaters or men there to nurse a beer or a solitary dinner.

I try to ignore it. I’m used to staying up half the night to catch hockey games from home. But slowly, football or “fut,” in its myriad of leagues and teams, is making its way into my blood -- intravenous culture. Like the country itself.