Off-grid and Ignorant in Portugal

In my experience one should never turn down the offer of a free bar: it’s always fun and it usually leads to new friendships, but of course there can be consequences. So when I received the message from Vanessa and Jeremy who read this blog and live in Porto, it was an offer I couldn’t refuse. “We’ve just purchased a small quinta just outside Porto and the previous owners left few pieces behind,”...

We’d been mildly bothering Carlos the building supplies guy for a few weeks about bringing one of his big diggers in to help rearrange a few things. We’ve had a couple of rearrangements in the valley already and it usually involves setting a site visit, walking, talking, pointing and head scratching, and then waiting weeks for the agreed machine to rock up. Our most recent bothering was on our ump...

There are many good reasons to visit Marvão – a beautiful fortified hilltop town in Alentejo’s interior - but this is not the place for a day trip from our house. With a view over Spain, it’s more than four hours one-way, not giving much time for lunch or dinner at the fabulous Mil Homens restaurant , or to stay in the stunning pousada , or to do a sunrise walk around the castle and the town’s wal...

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Being in the right place at completely the wrong time used to be a professional blessing, but these days I’m not so sure. When I was a BBC foreign correspondent, friends would ask where I was planning to visit next so they could avoid going there on holiday because news stories seemed to follow me around the world. What could possibly happen moving to Miami? (Hurricane Katrina hit there first), or...

It was wonderful to be away, but it’s wonderful to be back in the Valley of the Stars – reinvigorated by a few weeks of adventure and ready to plunge back into the madness with renewed vigour. The builders have been busy while we’ve been away, the animals were almost as pleased to see us as our neighbour Daniel who’s been managing the menagerie solo for a week of torment by Simon & Garfunkel and t...

I suppose the first lesson of over-sharing ones trials and tribulations on social media is understanding the jigsaw effect of a headline and a photo placed together.. A lot of people only have time for the top line, and so posting a picture of me in hospital alongside the words “Hitting a Wall” would obviously lead to some not wholly accurate conclusions being drawn. Quite a few people now think I...

We’ve had our challenges since beginning this crazy new-life, off-grid-living adventure-in-paradise experiment, but the last couple of weeks have been my toughest so far.        And what’s odd is that it sneaked up on me. I just hit some kind of wall which has sapped me of energy, drained me of enthusiasm and ground everything I have been doing to a halt. It could be the impossible list of things...

It’s been one of those weeks in the Valley of the Stars . For the best part of three years water has been our obsession, but the latest attempt to solve our biggest long-term challenge has just ended in an expensive failure. We shower in mineral-rich borehole water and drink filtered rain, but for our new eco-lodge that’s not going to cut it. We need a reliable system of delivering plenty of clean...

There are many great things our off-grid life in rural Portugal gives us, but sometimes parachuting into another place with other people reminds us how different we have become. Ana and I are not known for living in normal places and working nine to five (what a way to make a living?), but I enjoyed a moment of self-refection while we spent a sunny Sunday afternoon drinking beer brewed by monks an...

There’s a lot of concern from friends and in the media at the moment that the machines are taking over the world and we will soon to be doomed to a life of servility to our artificially intelligent masters. Perhaps we are already in The Matrix and now the ChatGPT bot can write undergraduate essays, human life on the planet is all but over. Obviously those of us sitting off the grid in rural Portug...

Going Off The Grid means different things to different people. One iteration is me living barefoot on the land, not washing my long hair and disappearing down disinformation rabbit holes: “Turn on, tune in, drop out” as Timothy Leary urged in the 1960s. The resilience and persistence of Portuguese brambles and the spiky grass seed pods that drive Simon the dog to distraction keep my shoes firmly a...

On the occasion of my 100th despatch from the Valley of the Stars I had hoped to share stories of success, of overcoming the odds despite a total ignorance and having reached some form of accomplished-DIY and self-sufficient level of consciousness. Sadly it was not to be. It was one of those days when something was clearly in retrograde. You know, one of those days where everything you try to do j...

There’s something I find very special about islands perched in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean and this week’s despatch originates on one of them. It’s a place known for its highs: we slept suspended 8m above the ground and breathed in bubbles of sulphur steam. Do you know where it is yet? We ate black pudding with pineapple, lodged in a windmill, ventured through underground tunnels to reach a h...

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit alastairleithead.substack.com

There have been times since embarking on this slightly crazy off-grid existence when I’ve had the overwhelming feeling that things have been spiralling out of control. Batteries have failed, machines have broken and the delicate balancing act of converting sunshine into heat and power has occasionally tipped us into darkness. I’ve chased my tail, frantically doggy-paddled to keep my head above wat...

“Mais animais” as they say around here – more animals. Shortly after sending out last week’s despatch, Val Kilmer’s kittens started appearing – we counted them one by one with an increasing sense of fear and foreboding, but thankfully she stopped at a conservative five. Not content with being a teenage mum it was also clear that there wasn’t just one father, but three or four. Imagine. And so a sm...

“So you’re retired?” someone asked me recently. We’ve given up our jobs, moved to the countryside, don’t have any income but are spending lots of money building things, so I suppose we could give that impression. My alternative answer to “no of course not” is: “yes, in the sense that we get tired, we recover, and then get tired again...or re-tired you might say.” Often it’s a 5am start and a 10pm...

This year we decided to spend the ‘New Year, New Start’ gym membership money on post-it notes. The white board just wasn’t big enough for what we aimed to achieve on January 3rd when we felt compelled to get a grip on the chaos of our projects our business and our lives in general. Inspired by Ana’s experience of work planning retreats she led our inaugural annual planning meeting with the support...

On New Year’s Eve 2022, the last despatch of the year looks back at the challenges we’ve faced in a tough but fun year, and what we hope to achieve in 2023. Thanks for listening - and for following the blog and/or the podcast - please share it with a few friends to help broaden our support community that’s helping us through our big new adventure. Audio versions of next year’s despatches will all...

Finally digging for water in December 2022 - and getting a lot more from the sky than the ground (and a lot more cheaply)…but them’s the breaks. TRANSCRIPT… It was months ago when Twitching Justino’s divining rods first dipped towards the ground and two crossed sticks X-marked the spot where he literally felt we would have the best hope of finding water. As I wrote in August: “the only control you...

Visiting a festival devoted to a surprising vegetable, but a lesson in just what our region is famous for from November 2022. TRANSCRIPT… Different people value many different things very differently, and it turns out one of those things in this part of the world is the sweet potato. The humble batata-doce, as it’s known in Portuguese, enjoys a cult status worthy of celebration, police checkpoints...

Having survived the fire, the equipment for our huge new solar power system needed a bit of final tweaking in October 2022 before the giant metaphorical Frankenstein switch could be thrown and the control room could start throbbing with energy. TRANSCRIPT… While energy costs continue to spiral, those of us living off the grid are allowing ourselves a brief self-congratulatory moment in the sun. In...

The aftermath of the big fire, tackling some small spot fires a week later, losing one of our oldest oak trees, and trying to work out a master-plan by turning disaster to our advantage from October 2022. TRANSCRIPT… A full week after fire hit the valley I asked Ana what she would least expect to see on the same hillside where it started. “Another fire,” she replied, and she was right! Our eyes ar...

A scary day in September 2022 as the wind changed, a fire started a few miles away and we had to pack up everything we didn’t want to lose and headed for the hills in the hope there’d be a home to return to… TRANSCRIPT… If you saw a fire heading your way and had less than an hour to bundle together all the worldly possessions you wanted to keep – the ones that could fit in the car alongside one sm...