AWAY IN THE ALGARVE
THE ALGARVE, the province at the very bottom of Portugal, is scruffy with abundance. Gardens spill over their crumbling walls. Fish markets are mosh pits. Orange and fig trees grow next to the street, dropping fruit on the sidewalk in riotous spatters. It’s a region where many people still live off the land and the sea, where in every other yard there’s a chaotic pile of outboard motors, and around every other corner, a tractor going dangerously slow—or a teenager on a motorbike who tries to run you off the road. The point is, a lot of the Algarve feels untamed.
One night in the dark, dusty middle of nowhere, you’ll be talking to a man in a small restaurant, a Portuguese guy in work pants with a three-day stubble, and suddenly he’ll come at you with a two-tined fork bearing a hunk of something fishy, a hot little bite dripping with olive oil—some oceanic specimen the name of which can’t be exactly translated into English—and he’ll insist, “You try this”. So you do. And you burn your mouth. But the deliciousness is so complete, so richly simple, you wouldn’t want it any other way.
None of this is what I expected. I’d thought the Algarve was overcooked. Though the region had withstood invasion by the Phoenicians, the Visigoths, and the Moors, it was, in the 1970s
