Jan 21, 2017
By Harriet Larcher de Brito Smith
Hiking up the Amazing southwest coast of Portugal
We set off on a roughly 200km (124 miles) hike up the Portuguese coast early on a spring morning. As we walked out of the farm where we’d been for the past month, I looked back at it with a slight sadness that I was leaving this place that had given me so much peace. Nevertheless, I was reassured by the excitement of the new adventure that lay ahead. He didn’t look back, I don’t think he ever did.
The sky was spotted with clouds, the perfect hiking weather I thought, as the intermittent whitish patches gave us a cool relief from the, already quite hot, sun. The first stretch of our route ascended into the hills that made their way inland; immediately we felt the weight of our backpacks. As we climbed up the dirt path we had the familiar view of the farm, the dunes and the Atlantic behind us; in front of us an unknown winding trail through the hills. We packed light, I left half of my things at the farm, but we still had to carry a reasonable amount of stuff seeing that we were planning to hike and wild camp our way up the Rota Vicentina.
The path was at times sandy and high up in the cliffs over the sea, or through the open landscape of the coastal hills with its patches of Mediterranean pine forests. Along the way we passed small villages and stocked up on food. I can’t really say that there was an average distance we walked per day. We had no time or distance goals, we walked as far as we felt we wanted to. Some days pushing ourselves with the avid determination of discovering our limits, and learning to feel both the pleasure and the pain in our bodies; other days stopping somewhere half way through the day because we found a beautiful place and we wanted to enjoy it for a while longer.
We walked a lot of the time in silence. That was something I learned with him, to just be in the moment with yourself more often. It is also why I think we could hike up the coast together even after knowing each other for a relatively short time; it was a friendship that allowed each other a lot of space, even while having to spend 24/7 together.
Every night we slept with a different scenery in Portugal: under a huge fig tree, on an empty sandy beach or on a cliff overlooking the sea… I have to describe the latter. The rocks dipped into a cosy depression, walled on every side except the one facing the open ocean. There was only one place where our tent could fit among the craggy rocks, which didn’t look too comfortable, but was nonetheless the best we could find as dusk approached.
We pitched our tent and collected wood for a small fire on which we baked sweet potatoes wrapped in tinfoil; seasoned with thyme that grows wild along that coastline. With our warm jackets on, as it gets pretty chilly and windy at dusk, we sat on the rocks listening to the waves beat against the bottom of the cliff while we ate our sweet potatoes with our hands and watched the sun set over the Atlantic.
“I’ve never seen it, but do you know that there is this phenomenon where just as the sun sets completely there is a flash of green light?”, he asked me. I knew nothing of it. We watched the sun’s last rays disappear with the same candid awe that we did everyday; and guess what? There it was, a flash of green light. We most naturally knew that that evening would stay in our memory forever. It was as if the beauty of the landscape, the coincidental event of the green flash, the fire on the rocks, the sweet potatoes seasoned with fresh thyme, were the coordinated instruments of an orchestra playing a beautiful composition by Nature of life on the trail.
I have almost no pictures at all of this trip and maybe I will not remember every single moment of the journey, or the correct order of events. What remains with me is the opening up of my mind and my body to the natural world through the slowness of hiking and sleeping in the wild day after day. I learned to embrace the raw beauty of nature around me and within me; to feel the world to the utmost of my human sensory capacity.
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About the Author
Harriet Larcher de Brito Smith
I am Portuguese/South African and an outdoor enthusiast. My background is in Social Entrepreneurship and Biology. I love people and learning languages; I'm on my fifth one now. Recently I have been embracing the “slow” movement if you can call it that way; slow food, slow fashion, and slow travel of course, as it seems to me to be the more satisfying and meaningful way of experiencing the world.