Friday 4th December

Only 21 days to go, or for us insomniacs, one more sleep.

Minas de Sao Domingo, we’re in a mining town, I thought I had read somewhere it was a silver mine, the area is known for it’s copper mines. This aire is on the edge of town next to another reservoir. There is a bar / cafe here but it is closed for the winter however they did leave the wifi switched on. That’s why you got three blog posts yesterday, everyone sits down by the waterside on the picnic benches with laptops out and catching up with the world.

There is space enough here for 20 motorhomes, we’ve got lights to mark out each pitch but in the season there will be cars here and you might not be lucky to find a space. It is very peaceful here and some units have been here for a while, every so often one will creep off to get to the services and leave all their chairs behind to save the space. Did I mention that it is free here, we really can’t see the logic, we would pay €5 per night to stay here, in fact since entering Spain three weeks ago we have spent a total of €4 on site fees.

It is so nice here that we have stayed a second night, things are so chilled out, everyone is sitting in out in the sun (sorry, the weather has been glorious, the hottest day yet) and the forecast is getting better.

We went for a walk after breakfast to see what was about, not much I’m afraid. We followed the signs for the casa de minieros but it was closed. Two very small bars, a mini mini supermarket and dusty potholed cobble streets, there really is very little money in this area.

We’ve got the obligatory church, the clock is running six minutes fast, it chimes on the hour and every half hour and just in case you miss it, everything is repeated two minutes later. ALL NIGHT LONG as well! The church is fairly recent, as the mine has increased in size the village has had to move to keep out of it’s way.

Oranges just sitting on the floor. There must be something that can be done with them.

The mining village really is a working class place. Most of the homes are one room with a chimney, the information boards mention that some of them have windows, there is no one about except for a few old boys in the cafe waiting for the day to pass them by.

I said yesterday that I would post a photo of our map. This is from our Collins 2014 Road Map of Europe. All the black dots are aires that been copied off of Camper Contact, we have notes from fellow campers. We are just to the right of the aire near the middle with a circle around it. That place is Mertola and it has been recommended to us recently. I think the bottom coast of Portugal is 80 miles long, there are about 24 aires right on the coast, more inland, I don’t think we’ll really be having any problems finding somewhere to stay (probably shouldn’t have said that!!).

And here is our Collins Europe Road Map showing in black last years route (clockwise) and in purple this years route. Both of the Collins maps were picked up in The Works as well as a couple of other travel guide books. We also managed to buy a few books from the local library who think that a five year old guide book is past it’s best, don’t they know that most of these places have been there for thousands of years? Still I’m not complaining about old travel books for 50p each.