Like most of Southern Europe Portugal makes much of this
special time, a few days before Shrove Tuesday, when most of the sizeable towns
put on their Carnival processions through the streets. The revelry at this time also helps to
brighten up this otherwise drab time of the year between Christmas and
Easter. What we hadn’t realised was that
the children put on their own processions on the Friday before the big weekend,
just to get them used to the idea I suppose. Luckily we stumbled upon the
childrens’ procession in Faro without knowing anything about it beforehand and
also managed to get to a couple of Adult ones too on the Saturday in Quarteira and
Tuesday in Alte.
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| Quarteira |
We had been staying at the coast for most of the previous month but now decided to have another look inland and made a steady climb up in the hills to Alte, described in the tourist brochures as a pretty village with whitewashed stone houses. It was certainly much bigger than we expected with tiny winding single lane streets at the centre and two ‘fonts’ or water springs which I suppose gave the reason for the original settlement here.
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| Alte |
As the weather had changed from previous sunny days we
wondered if there would be any brave scantily clad dancers at all but the sun
did come out briefly and because of the size of the village it all seemed very
intimate and good fun. So much better than the previous processions we had seen.
We don’t know how they all managed to keep going, singing and dancing for two solid hours around the winding streets of Alte – we were tired at the end just watching.
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| Elvis is alive in the Algarve! |
Men
– Sorry, as you can see from the photo’s all dancers fully clothed this time.
(seems the posters around town were a trifle misleading!)
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| Blowing bubbles! |
