One foot from the Algarve

Scoffing a Full-English in a café full of the English is not what I travel for.
For many though it seems home-only-hotter is what makes a holiday

In the 1993 Christmas special of classic nineties sit-com One Foot in the Grave the Meldrews and their long-suffering shrew of a family friend Mrs Warboys head off to a villa in Portugal’s Algarve for a relaxing holiday; one which they predictably do not get.

This is a world I do not inhabit. Package holidays and budget carrier deals to popular tourist flytraps have never been my thing. In fact, their role as stereotype and sit-com fodder is about as much as I know of them – the holidaymaker who doesn’t know which country their resort is in let alone are able to point it out on a map, the bringers of tea-bags and chocolate digestives because they can’t imagine life without them and the ones whose only tales of their trip are from the all-inclusive hotel they never set foot from.

Stereotypes exist for a reason of course and so finding myself in the Algarve recently I was expecting to see at least a few well-worn clichés to provide some light relief from time to time. But even with that expectation I was surprised by both the scale of their numbers and the scale to which this part of Portugal has been subverted in pursuit of their tourist Euros.

These holidaymakers aren’t one foot in the Algarve, they are one foot away from it. A step very few of them seem remotely interested in taking.

Ventnor, not Vilamoura

Expansive multi-storey hotels line the shore at Vilamoura and those not lucky enough (or who haven’t paid the extra) to have a sea-view may be able to console themselves with a view of the marina at the heart of the town, around which are probably more bars and restaurants than those hotels could fill.

Walking around that marina two rather odd things increasingly struck me. First of all the restaurant pimps drumming up trade never failed to greet us in English as their first choice of language. Secondly there didn’t seem to be a Portuguese menu to be found. Curry, steak and chips, pizza or maybe a cheeky chinky? They’ve got you covered. Something local? Hmm, tricky!

It felt like the seafront at Blackpool, a view which was reinforced when we stepped into a marina-side bar and found the evening’s entertainment; a crooner working his way through a succession of rat-pack classics surely all instantly recognisable to the Radio Two brigade eating and drinking in there. English was the only tongue I heard from the singer and the only tongue seemingly spoken by the patrons.

Behind my friends sat an archetype of the British gray-pound that seemed to be propping-up this out-of-season seaside town. Taking breaks to sip his crème-de-menthe on ice he occupied his time videoing the singer on a camcorder possibly older than he was. I suspect holding that camcorder was the only thing stopping him hand-jiving along to it. Is this really a memory of a Portuguese holiday worth recording? Is it really something to share with your friends and neighbours when you get back home, English songs sung in an English bar?

On my post-pint trip to the gents I found the sign on the door was also in English, neither as a helpful translation nor to accompany the usual little man icon,  “Gentlemen” was the only sign this bog-door bore.

Albion, not Albufeira

Seemingly surreal but far from unique since the Anglicisation of the Algarve turns out to be rife and Vilamoura far from its extreme. In Albufeira for example a charming and historic town square sports a veritable marathon of Brit-friendly bars and restaurants, each with an in-your-face and occasionally inventive tavern-tout to drag you in, again never failing to pitch primarily in English. I’m told that in the summer, especially at weekends, this quaint little town-square is rife with Ryanair’s best selection of shirtless, stag-weekending Brits boozed-up to buggery. Or how about the beachfront boardwalk at Portimão, where you’re never more than a few minutes away from a café hawking a Full English to a crowd full of the English.

I’m in Portugal but where the bloody hell is Portugal?

Quintessential not essential

Tourists are lazy, a fact I’ve long celebrated whenever I’ve found myself amongst them because it’s seldom more than a five-minute walk to get the hell away from them. A happy consequence of this in the Algarve is that the real Portugal, or at least a comparatively uncontaminated approximation of it, is always just around a corner or two.

Quiet warrens of village back-streets, towns full of real Portuguese people living real Portuguese lives; produce markets, fish markets and fishing harbours, cafes where English small-talk doesn’t clog the air, where people-watching is fresh sport once more and where ordering is a mixture of pidgin and pointing always rewarded with good-natured smiles, friendly understanding and the taste of something new. It is so little effort to find it yet so few bother to make that effort, a fact at once both sad and a salvation.

Package-tourists and cheap flights may have bombed bits of the Algarve out of existence but at least they’ve kept the blast zones small.

Pontins to Portugal

None of what goes before is a judgement but merely an observation. Each to their own after all; just because I choose to travel for work or to broaden my mind and challenge my preconceptions, choose to travel for new experiences rather than slightly warmer old ones in no-way means other people should be doing the same thing too.

Nonetheless it still seems a somewhat sorry state of affairs to see so many of my countrymen travelling abroad to seek nothing other than home with a hotter climate and to hear so many of them viewing anything un-British and natively Portuguese about their trip as cause for complaint rather than celebration. It also seems a little sorry to see a proud and rich culture capitulate so readily to it.

And to be judgemental would be, I must admit, just the tiniest bit hypocritical. My night in Vilamoura did centre round a curry and a few beers after all. What could be more quintessentially British than that?

But then, when you might as well be in Rome, you might as well do as the Romans do.