Off-grid and Ignorant in Portugal

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: journalists, more than most, really need a deadline to get stuff done. And I, more than most journalists, really need a deadline. And there’s nothing like hosting a wedding for the first time – with 100 guests – to focus the mind. “Sure,” I waved, “we’ll build a deck there, and throw up a shade over the front of the Clubhouse for the meal, no bother.” It’...

“It’s how we’re related to Drew Barrymore,” is how I’ve always started Simon’s story, so it’s a good way to also bring it to a close after 14 and a half years. As a hack I do like headlines. “I met Ana playing tennis with her husband...but we got together through clowns and fire,” is a favourite introduction to our love story. More about that another time. Oda and Ana found Simon cowering under a...

Before we start, I would like to ask you a favour – it won’t take long and it’ll really help us out. Portugal’s main tourism and hospitality association AHRESP has shortlisted us for a media award for our podcast series Ana & Al’s Big Portuguese Wine Adventure . We’re in the final five and the winner is decided by popular vote - your vote. Please could you vote for us? ONLY TWO DAYS LEFT - PLEASE...

For the best part of six years, a crazy combination of ambition, naivety, mis-placed confidence and pig-headed determination has created Vale das Estrelas. It’s living proof that ridiculous ideas which might just work, can actually work. Continuing the theme of doing something which creates far more work than we actually have time to spend...and so utterly outside our comfort zone that it shouldn’...

Dry January is a distant memory, Lent is nearly done, the sun is shining here in the valley, and spring has not only sprung, but is now powering into Portuguese summer time. Personally, January wasn’t terribly dry (because of my birthday...and the weather) and I somehow missed the start of Lent altogether...presumably due to that food and wine binge in Cape Town I told you about last time . But my...

Portugal’s unusually wet winter put a dampener on everything except perhaps reservoir levels and groundwater reserves. So it was great to swap the “conveyor belt of storms” for a real-life airport conveyor belt as we closed our doors for a couple of weeks and headed south for some southern summer and two glorious weeks in Cape Town. We’ve now returned from the sunshine, a deep dive into South Afri...

Marta has arrived. After being battered by Ingrid, Joseph, Kristin...oh Kristin...and Leonardo, the sixth named storm of the year has done what only storm systems can do...and is “barrelling” into Portugal. There are certain words and phrases it’s hard to separate from their familiar context. Is anything else dour (pron: DOO-er) except a Scotsman? Only perhaps the weather in Scotland...which is re...

For a recovering news addict, the daily barrage of bad news breaks over me like the Atlantic waves on our wild west Portuguese coast. The inundation of daily briefings, updates and newsletters which arrive from the various trusted outlets from different sides of the widening political divide are a deluge to duck below, wait out and then resurface in calmer waters. Of course, the next swell is alre...

One of the great things about being married to a Portuguese Swede is also one of the great things about being an only child: it really pays off at Christmas. As a kid I was the spoilt brat with no brothers or sisters to share the gift space on Santa’s sleigh; and as a grown-up I get to celebrate twice...or some might argue, three times. Since Ana and I met, Christmas has officially begun on Decemb...

We have already learned a lot of new jobs in this new career path, and for the past two weeks we’ve been trying to learn another one: marketing. Having just about got to grips with off-grid living (first basic, then advanced level), building site project management, landscaping, interior design (Ana, definitely not me), accounting and basic small-hotelier-ing...we’ve reached the next rung on the c...

On the rare occasion the entire Portuguese power grid goes down for a few hours we are positively smug, but the other side of the coin is keeping everything running when a big storm hits. And all of us on the western edge of Europe have had some kind of encounter with Storm Claudia (as Spanish meteorologists named her) over the past week or so. As any household relying on nothing but solar power w...

It’s more than 30,000 years since elephants last wandered the rolling landscape of Portugal’s Alentejo, but that’s all about to change. The last known tracks the pachyderms left behind are a series of fossilised footprints discovered here on our wild west coast of Alentejo. Not long after their steps in the sand were frozen in time, the giant, straight-tusked elephants were extinct. It wasn’t unti...

In the voyage of discovery that is making it up as you go along , our little late-summer lull didn’t last very long. I last wrote about us suddenly realising it was September with the brief moment we had to reflect on our first summer season as small-hoteliers. In retrospect I can put an exact date on that lull: Thursday September 11th – our first night without guests since the rollercoaster ride...

So that’s what they mean by the silly season...how did it suddenly become September? It’s been both exhilarating and exhausting, but we couldn’t have asked for a better summer start to the latest stage of our off-grid Portuguese adventure. And this week we enjoyed something which a few months ago would have been utterly terrifying in the face of an rapidly expanding overdraft...a night with no gue...

We’ve heard many encouraging words in the various iterations of these despatches, from Off-Grid and Ignorant, Off-Grid and Open and now Off-Grid and Entertaining (people)...in Portugal. And having welcomed quite a few guests already this summer, we love seeing their words left on the website reviews sections even more. Obviously the five out of fives and the ten out of tens aren’t going to last fo...

Portugal loves a party, and the summer season smoothly segues from festa straight into to festa . Since most schools were out from early June the festivities have been off to a flying start with both the unusually hot weather arriving unseasonably early this year...and with a football trophy. Beating the old enemy Spain on penalties in the UEFA Nations League final set the tone for the opening hol...

The metaphors have moved from walking through mud to battling thick undergrowth as the moment in the year has passed when the clay on our land turns to concrete. A very wet winter has given everything an extra spurt of growth, and now that the days are getting longer and sun is getting stronger it’s a jungle out there. The dogs have shed their muddy socks and now bring dust rather than wet pawprin...

Surprised, interested, shocked, concerned and intrigued all sum up our reaction to the massive power cuts across Portugal and Spain, but perhaps the most appropriate description of our mood was: smug. When the traffic lights went dark, petrol stations closed and panic struck the ice cream shops of the nearby tourist towns on our southwestern coast of Alentejo, we could rest easy. Our freezer-load...

For more than three years now there’s been a loop of thinking, building, pushing and waiting...but we’ve finally opened our doors to a flurry of guests. With thanks to friends – and friends of friends – for booking in advance and betting we’d be ready, we had our biggest test so far this Easter holiday week, with six of our seven units filled and a peak of 17 people staying. Despite all the fears...

Well, that was easy. After years of waiting and hoping, begging and pushing, of sleepless nights and stressful days our reaction was...understated when the email came through. We’d roped in a trade organisation to help us bother and worry the town hall decision makers and were told everything seemed on track and a decision would be delivered on Friday or Monday. Friday nervously came and went as a...

Since our Portuguese adventure began, there are certain phrases I never thought I’d say out loud. For example: “Once we discovered pillow tanks we knew we had the answer to rainwater capture.” Then there things I never knew I’d even know, let alone say out loud: “The LPWAN system is like WiFi over kilometres and it helps us blend our mineral salted water with rain to make drinking water...oh, and...

Birthday presents can reveal a lot about one’s age, stage of life and current circumstances, and this couldn’t have been closer to the truth than on the occasion of my 53rd birthday. I mean this year’s couldn’t have been much more self-explanatory: * two chequered shirts * working dungarees with lots of pockets * steel-capped safety boots * a two-pack of crowbars I presume this means there’s stuff...

Januaries here in Portugal are more palatable than most northern hemisphere winters. For one, I never do the whole Dry January thing because it’s my birthday month, and while we do need more rain, I love the clear chilly mornings which open up into beautiful sunny blue skies. The low arcing winter sun strikes our south facing glass and pours heat into our house – something it doesn’t do in the hig...

Despite the excesses of Christmas, and the many visitors we’ve been welcoming to the valley, I’ve managed to put together a video of our whole building project as it took shape from start to finish. As well as writing updates and despatches, I’ve been photographing and videoing our land ever since we started cutting down our tatty eucalyptus plantation almost four years ago. I’ve documented every...

We started the Google search with escarradeira , then moved on to cuspideira and then we started calling people. A few hours and many phone calls later we realised we just weren’t going to be able to buy any spittoons for our first big wine event at Vale das Estrelas. And there are some pretty compelling statistics for why that might be. Who, you might ask, are the biggest wine consumers in the wo...