Author Gayle

After Madeira we flew back to Portugal, picked up a car and headed off for a few weeks of exploring. Porto, Lindoso and Monsanto were some of the places we visited, but in our travels we saw quite a lot… Continue Reading →

The title of ‘Most Portuguese Village in Portugal’ has been awarded only once. The winning village was Monsanto. The year was 1938. The competition may have been part of the Salazar dictatorship’s propaganda machine, and Monsanto’s win may have had something… Continue Reading →

‘Enter the Village ONLY TO THE FOOD COFFEE IN PARADA-BEAUTIFUL’ was the instruction we’d been given, though we had no idea what it meant. Our destination was Lindoso, in Portugal’s far north. In these parts, the only available accommodation is… Continue Reading →

There’s an old Portuguese saying that goes something like this: Porto is where we work, Lisbon is where we play, Coimbra is where we study, and Braga is where we pray. Though when you consider that Portugal’s second city is… Continue Reading →

For Madeira’s relatively small size – just 800 square kilometres – the island’s landscape is surprisingly diverse. We managed to cover quite a bit of it during our visit, but the best locations were those we could get to only… Continue Reading →

Say the word ‘Madeira’ and we think of buttery cake or maybe some kind of dessert wine. We certainly don’t think ‘tropical island paradise’. Or we didn’t – until we went there. Madeira is an autonomous Portuguese territory in the… Continue Reading →

An hour after we landed in Lisbon we were sitting at a slightly rickety table on a couple of mismatched chairs drinking cheap red wine and scoffing crusty bread and chunks of fresh tomato smothered in olive oil. Delicious! We… Continue Reading →

After a month of mucking about in the snow, like a couple of migrating birds we headed south to warmer climes. Our flight path included a short stop in London (to fulfil a visa requirement for something we might want… Continue Reading →

Our swing through Scandi capitals ended in Copenhagen. Our home in the Danish capital was right in the middle of the red-light district, just down the road from a couple of safe injecting rooms and around the corner from the… Continue Reading →

A trip on Stockholm’s tunnelbana, the city’s underground rail system, is no ordinary journey. Most of the network’s stations – more than 90 – have been transformed from purely functional spaces into galleries of art. In a project that began… Continue Reading →