A retiree's adventures in moving from New Mexico to Portugal
Author: rosepatch3
Rosalie Rayburn is a writer, world traveler, avid cyclist who shares her time between the US and Portugal. She writes a blog about international relocation and is the author of The Power of Rain, a mystery set in New Mexico, USA.
Christmas goodies on display at my local Intermarché supermarket in Portugal
As Christmas approaches, stores in Portugal are brimming with decorations, boxes of chocolates and mounds of foods appropriate to the season. Friends, neighbors and people in the stores are offering each other the traditional Christmas and New Year’s wishes, which in Portuguese are: “Feliz Natal e Prospero Ano Novo.” New Year’s Eve is called “Passagem do Ano” or passing of the year.
Fireworks are typical at the New Year season and the past two years even my rural area has, at times, sounded like the middle of a battlefield. Unfortunately the latest surge of Covid infections has forced the cancellation of many traditional firework displays and other public celebrations. Still, the city streets are decorated with colored lights and the atmosphere is festive.
Christmas decorations in Praça do Comercio and Rua Augusta in Lisbon, Dec. 2019.
While Portugal has a wealth of pastries for sale every day at its thousands of cafés, the traditional sweet eaten during the Christmas season is Bolo Rei or King’s cake. This is a round bread-like cake decorated with crystalized fruits. It is especially typical on January 6, the day celebrated for the arrival of the Magi, or three kings.
Turkey has become a staple of Christmas meals in the US and UK. Cranberry sauce is a regular accompaniment in the US, while brussels sprouts or parsnips are popular in the UK. When I lived in western Norway the Christmas dish for Julebord was pinnekjøttmade from dried salted ribs of lamb served with boiled potatoes. Here in Portugal traditional Christmas fare is bacalhau (dried salted cod) and cabbage. It seems counterintuitive that this would be a festive dish since dishes featuring bacalhau can be found on the menu year round at any restaurant. But there you go.
Bacalhau is an age old way of preserving codfish by salting it and drying it. Before it can be cooked it must be cut in pieces and soaked for many hours and the water changed several times to remove the salt. Huge slabs of dried cod are stacked in every supermarket year round, giving off a – shall we say – “distinctive” odor.
Stacks of bacalhau, dried salted cod, for sale at my local Intermarché supermarket.
Be sure to follow my blog to hear tales of everyday life in Portugal. Feliz Natal!
I have been fortunate enough to find opportunities to keep my writing skills honed while learning more about my newly adopted country, Portugal. The online magazine Portugal Living Magazine has a wealth of articles with useful and fascinating information for those interested in moving here or people who can glean practical tips for everyday life.
The latest issue is now available and below is a glimpse at the recent piece I wrote about Coimbra, Portugal’s third largest city, one-time capital and home to its oldest university. (page 44 in the current issue.)
Another of my articles that appears in the current issue of Portugal Living focuses on a unique type of team-building called Equine Assisted Training. Individuals and groups benefit from learning leadership techniques and group management styles through a series of exercises with horses. Working for the folks who run the EAT courses was what brought me to this part of central Portugal as a Workaway.com volunteer in 2018. A year later I was lucky enough to find my dream house in the same village. I still help out with the horses. (on page 32.)
The grandson of the owner of the Casal de Santa Iria olive press, or lagar, helps my Belgian neighbor unload his olives ready for pressing.
Olive harvesting is well under way in my part of Portugal. Today, most of the olive presses are modern affairs that look like an industrial brewery. They use heat in the pressing process and many people say that the heat affects the taste of the oil. But there are still some old-fashioned presses that use traditional methods of cold pressing. The old ways are much more labor-intensive. There is a lot of camaraderie as the workers perform the multiple steps that transform the whole olives into a puree which is then squeezed to release the precious golden-green oil.
I had the great good fortune to visit one of these old-fashioned olive presses recently when I helped my neighbor, Chris, with his harvest. He and his wife had helped me pick my olives. In return, I helped them pick theirs. We went together to an olive press in a nearby hamlet. The Portuguese word for olive press is “lagar”, with the emphasis on the second syllable.
The Casal de Santa Iria lagar is a family affair; owned by Grandfather Manuel, and operated by his son and grandson. When we arrived, the grandson guided the car with the trailer bearing the bags of olives onto a weigh station. The weighing machinery reminded me of an antiquated vote tabulating machine. Once weighed, an augur crushes the olives into a purée that looks like tapenade. The purée is fed into a pipe and when a worker turns a spigot, it spreads out onto a spinning circular mat. The mats, which look as if they are made of woven rope, have a hole in the middle. When covered with the olive purée, workers lift the mat and slide it onto a spindle.
They repeat this process, building a stack of mats on the spindle. When the stack gets about waist high, a mechanism lowers the spindle platform so they can continue piling the mats. Eventually, it looks like a giant stack of pancakes about 2 meters high.
The workers then wheel the spindle platform over to one of four pressing stations. When the spindle of mats is fixed into the pressing station, pressure is applied from below to squeeze out the precious olive oil.
Above left, olives in the hopper. Above: olive purée spreads on a spinning rope mat, while a worker stacks an olive-coated mat onto a spindle.
When we visited, the place was noisy and somewhat hazardous, since the floor was slick with olive oil. But the workers were okay when my neighbor and I wandered around having a good look and taking plenty of pictures. All the machinery looked like the kind of heavy industrial engineering you would have maybe seen in a WWII-era munitions factory. But this was a step ahead of the old-style crushing by stone that characterised even older olive presses.
From left: Workers fixing the spindle into the pressing station. A pressing station halfway through the pressing. A metal collar collects the oil.
The oil is collected in a basin affixed to the base of the spindle and funnelled to a nearby vat. A worker explained to us that the squeezing process yields water as well as oil. In the vats, the water sinks to the bottom and the oil floats.
Meanwhile, the stack of mats is taken away, a worker removes what remains from the crushed olive residue and the mats are reused. The brown, earthy-looking residue reminded me of slices of peat that I had seen people burn in Ireland. According to the lagar owner’s grandson, the residue can be sold for further processing to produce oil which is used for cosmetics,
Left: vats of freshly pressed olive oil. Right: a worker removes the crushed olive residue from the rope mats which are then reused.
The rule of thumb is usually about 10 percent of oil to the weight of olives. My neighbors received about 17.5 litres of oil from their 180 kilos of olives. We went back to their house and did a ritual tasting, dipping pieces of bread into a bowl of the freshly pressed oil. It tasted strong, with a slight acidity, very different from anything I’ve ever bought in a store.
A modern olive press or “lagar” looks like a brewery. It uses heat to aid in the pressing process.
Answering questions:
A couple of people have asked me about eating the olives. The answer is no, you can’t eat them off the tree. The olives harvested in my area of central Portugal are almost all for oil. People do use a few of them for eating but you have to brine them first.
I tried this a couple of years ago using a recipe a neighbor gave me. It is labor intensive. You have to cut a nick in each olive. Make a solution of water and salt and soak the olives in brine in sterilised jars. Change the solution every other day, repeating the process five times over ten days. Finally, rinse the olives and store them in brine in the jars, making sure they are filled to the brim. Float a little olive oil on the top to help seal the jar. They can then be stored for several months. Rinse the olives when you want to use them and add some chopped garlic and chopped bayleaf. Delicious!
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Fountain in the garden of the Palacio de Queluz, near Sintra. The palace was used as a summer residence by the Portuguese royals in the 18th and 19th centuries. In its elegance and grandeur it is reminiscent of the Palace of Versailles outside Paris.
Portugal’s history includes its share of battles and adventures and you can imagine those distant days with a visit to some of its many castles and palaces. Before I settled in Portugal, I took the opportunity to visit some of the main tourist destinations, Lisbon’s Castelo São Jorge, the Moorish castle in Sintra, the Templar castle and Convento de Cristo in Tomar and the walled town of Obidos.
But since I settled here two years ago, I have rarely ventured out to play tourist – until the past week. On Monday, I took the train down to Lisbon and transferred via urban train to go to Queluz. This is on the outskirts of Lisbon, near Sintra which has many tourist attractions. Queluz is famous for a palace, the Palácio de Queluz which started life as a hunting lodge. The transformation began in 1747 under Dom Pedro who married his niece, the future Queen Maria I in 1760. It’s considered one of the finest examples of rococo architecture
Vast and rambling, it is reminiscent of the Palace of Versailles outside Paris. You can easily spend a couple of hours wandering through the elegantly furnished rooms. Outside there are extensive formal gardens with pools, terraces, fountains and statues depicting characters from Greek mythology – and some pretty weird-looking fish!
The mirror-lined Throne Room used for balls and banquets, with detail showing gilded statues of Atlas.
The palace also has its tragic side. Queen Maria I was apparently so grief-stricken by the death of her son José from smallpox in 1788 that she eventually went mad.
The Sala dos Embaixadores, or Ambassadors’ room which was used to receive visiting foreign dignitaries and for concerts.
Medieval Adventures
Delving further back into Portugal’s history, a visitor can easily discover Roman ruins and the many defensive castles built during the reconquest from the Moorish invasion in the early Middle Ages and from dynastic disputes with Portugal’s much larger neighbor, Spain.
About 40 minutes drive north of where I live, in central Portugal, is the town of Penela. The small town not far from the famous university city of Coimbra, is home to a medieval castle perched on top of a hill overlooking a vast farming and forested area.
Be prepared to do some climbing as you walk up the narrow streets of the town to the hilltop castle. Remember, this was a key defensive spot. You can walk along the narrow crenelated stone ramparts and look down the dizzying drop to the valleys below. A the highest point, there is a huge stone surrounded by walls with niches equipped with slits and small holes where fighters could fire arrows and lob whatever they threw in Medieval times. At the base of the structure are a life-size replica of a trebuchet and a catapult, weapons used to hurl objects at enemies in Medieval times.
View of the castle of Penela from below. Be prepared to climb some steps, but the view from the top is worth it.
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For the first time, I harvest olives from my own two trees, with the help of my wonderful neighbors, Chris and Anemie.
Note: I wrote this post in the fall of 2021, but it’s olive season again here in my part of Portugal and I am out picking olives with many of my neighbors. I love the way people follow the seasons, performing the age-old tasks that bring them together. Portuguese olive oil isn’t well known in the US or Britain, but it is superb, and in my little corner of Portugal, it is made with love.
October in my part of Portugal means Olives. This year the trillion or so olive trees that cover the hillsides and valleys around my village are loaded with olives. Great news for all my neighbors because last year there was nary an olive to be harvested.
I too have become obsessed with these little nuggets that yield valuable oil and tasty treats. I only have two trees on my land but the amount of olives hanging on those branches convinced me they needed harvesting. I made an agreement with one set of neighbors, to bring my olives over to their place. They have enough trees to yield the 400 kilos of olives to warrant their own pressing at the local “lager” or olive press. This means, they can make an appointment to bring their harvest and get the oil from their very own olives.
If you don’t have a big enough yield for your own pressing, you just take them along to the lager and they get mixed in with others. The oil you get is a mixture of your own olives and that from everyone else.
Olive picking in some parts of Portugal is highly mechanised. But here in the central part of the country, it is still a very labor intensive job, done by hand. It’s an opportunity for friends and neighbors to come together and spend a few hours or days working at this basic task.
First you spread out a huge green net to catch the fruit. Then, someone goes up the ladder into the tree, cuts branches and tosses them down to the picking crew on the ground. You can strip the olives from the branch either by hand or a small plastic rake. Once the tree is picked clean, the crew gathers up the big green net and dumps the olives into a large plastic bucket. It reminded me of documentaries I’ve seen about fishermen collecting their catch in the old days.
This year, my Belgian neighbors helped me pick, I also helped some British friends and neighbors pick and clean their olives. It’s a community affair and I love it!
The next step is to run the harvested olives through a machine called a “Lena” (leena) to remove any remaining twigs and stems. It’s basically a big drum with a hopper on top, a shaker mechanism and a fan that blows the cleaned olives through to a chute where they drop into a big bucket. The cleaned olives are then stored in heavy plastic backs until they can be taken to the olive press.
Olives harvested from my trees, my neighbours German workaday volunteers operate the Lena machine to clean the olives, and I beam at the cleaned olives in the big purple vat. Behind me are plastic bags of olives waiting to go to the press.
Olives are gradually changing from green to black, indicating they are nearly ready to be harvested.
My favorite time of year is fast approaching: olive season! It’s the time when the valleys all around me are buzzing with activity as neighbors are frenziedly making sure every last olive is picked.
Portugal is fast-becoming a major exporter of olives and olive oil. In 2000, Portugal exported about 40,000 tonnes of olives. By 2018, that rose to more than 134,000 tonnes. Most of the olives are grown and harvested in the Alentejo region, south of Lisbon. There, it’s all about intensive farming, high yields and advanced methods of producing the oil. Portugal now has more than 460 olive mills.
Harvesting the traditional way
Ladders used to access olive branches. Some people just climb into the trees.
Where I live, in central Portugal, olive harvesting is still done the old-fashioned way. As I only have two puny little olive trees on my land, I help my friends and neighbors with their harvest. It goes like this: you spread a large green net beneath the tree, someone climbs up and cuts olive-laden branches and the crew on the ground strips off the fruit. A lot of it is done by hand. Some people use tiny plastic rakes.
Everyone joins in. I’ve seen a grandmother of nearly eighty years old working alongside her granddaughter. Expats who come to live in Portugal are just as enthusiastic. From the middle of September onward, discussions are all about when the harvest will begin. In 2019 there was a bumper crop, but last year, there were hardly any olives and few people bothered to pick. This year, the trees are heavy with fruit and they are gradually turning black.
Once picked, the olives collect on the net beneath the tree. When the tree is completely stripped, the crew gathers the net together and dumps the olives into a big plastic bin. A machine locally known as a “leena” is used to remove any remaining stems and leaves and the olives are poured into large plastic bags.
Pressing the olives into oil
The local olive press is called the “lagar.” If you have a lot of trees and can pick several hundred kilos of olives, you can get your own “pressing.” This means that the oil you get from the lagar is from your very own olives. Since the lagar is usually operating round-the-clock during olive harvest, you have to book an appointment for your own pressing. Otherwise, if you only have a small amount, you take it to the press and they are added in with other people’s olives. The oil you receive depends on how many kilos of olives you bring.
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Volunteers turn out each year for the annual “vindima” or grape harvest, near my village in central Portugal.
This year the weather gods were in a good mood for the annual grape harvest, or “vindima” near my village in central Portugal. Typically, a couple of dozen volunteers show up and spend the morning snipping bunches of grapes then enjoy a wonderful meal provided by Manuel and Erminda, the couple who host the harvest.
Word went round that the event would be held on September 18. So, my neighbor and I showed up at the couple’s country store at 8 a.m. and followed a truck along a winding country road to the first vineyard. There, our host handed us each a pair of secateurs, or clippers, and a bucket and we headed off to join the others among the grape vines.
Snip, snip, snip and the bunches fall into the bucket. When the bucket is full one of us takes and empties it into a large plastic container, or “caneca”, which is about 2.5 feet high and around the same in diameter. Every now and then, a big burly guy would hoist the caneca onto his shoulder and march off to empty it into the back of one of the waiting trucks.
Volunteers search for bunches of grapes among the vines, snip them off and toss them into a bucket.
As we worked, the sun gradually became hotter, our hands became sticky with the sweet-tasting grape juice and my ears became attuned to all sorts of new expressions in Portuguese.
By around 1 p.m. we had finished the first two vineyards and we headed back to the home of Manuel and Erminda where they had set out tables in their basement, the “adega” where they make the wine. A wonderful meal of hearty soup, bread, olives, their own strong red wine, and a main course of fried fish and salad, had us all in a jolly mood. After the meal, the 15-year-old son of one of the helpers serenaded us with Portuguese folk tunes on his accordion. What more wonderful way to spend a Saturday!
Harvesting grapes in central Portugal – one of my favorite things to do.
My latest freelance article for the online lifestyle magazine Portugal Living, focuses on the town of Tomar in central Portugal which has begun attracting a lot of expatriates from the US. They are attracted by its historic charm and convenient location.
Tomar, a town of about 20,000 in central Portugal, is drawing a lot of interest from Americans who are thinking about moving to Portugal. Those who have visited, are charmed by its quaint historic district, it’s medieval Templar castle and the delightful Rio Nabão that flows through it.
They like the size of the town, its location and the essential shopping amenities it offers. Tomar is in central Portugal, about 90 minutes by road or train from Lisbon and an hour from the coast. You can also reach Porto, the country’s second largest city, in about two hours, or the third largest city, Coimbra, in about an hour by road. Coimbra is the site of Portugal’s oldest university.
I have traveled extensively in Portugal and I still think Tomar is the nicest town of its size in the country.
I first visited Tomar three years ago, shortly after I retired from my job as a journalist with the Albuquerque Journal, in New Mexico. I spent two months traveling the country, researching whether I could realize my dream to move to Portugal. As luck would have it, I found a beautifully restored old stone cottage in a village near the town and I have been happily living here since July 2019.
Earlier this year, I began freelancing for the new online magazine Portugal Living. My feature article on Tomar appears on page 26 of the Fall issue.
So, if you have an interest in moving to Portugal, check out my article. The magazine also has many articles which provide valuable information on subjects such as finances for expats, buying property and – of course – Portuguese wines!
Paço das Escolas at Coimbra University, with the Biblioteca Joanina (Joanine Library) on the left, a statue of King João III in the center and part of the Royal Palace of Aláçova on the right. The university was founded in 1290, but alternated between Coimbra and Lisbon until moving permanently to Coimbra in 1537 during the reign of King João III.
The university of Coimbra is the oldest in Portugal and one of the oldest in Europe. Among the many traditions it is known for are the groups of students who sing a special kind of Fado.
Fado is a style of song typical of Portugal. In Lisbon it is associated with mournful lyrics featuring themes of the sea and “saudade”. Loosely translated from the Portuguese, it means longing.
In Coimbra, the fado sung by students (fado de estudante) is more about poetry and unrequited love. It grew from the serenades given by students at ceremonies marking the beginning and end of the academic year. It is accompanied by a tear-drop shaped guitar called, the “guitarra de Coimbra.“
Students in Coimbra can often be seen around town in long black capes. EV Legters, an American writer who has lived in the city for four years said that prior to Covid lockdowns, they were a highly visible presence.
“There were students in robes everywhere, playing and singing. They sound so sincere,” she said. “They can bring tears to their eyes about the nostalgia, their love of the university and its culture.”
Coimbra university is also known for its multi-day parties. The Festa das Latas, or Latada, in October, marks the initiation of new students to the university. Traditionally new students dragged tin cans tied to their legs, “lata” means can in Portuguese. The Latada starts with student groups singing a serenade in front of the Sé Nova, the“new” cathedral. The term new is relative. It was a former Jesuit church founded in 1598.
The other main celebration is the Queima das Fitas, or burning of the ribbons. This is held early in May. It too kicks off with a serenade. This one is in front of the Sé Velha, the old cathedral, a massive Romanesque structure which dates from 1162. Students wear ribbons of different colors representing their faculties; yellow for medicine, red for law, and so on.
Both ceremonies are also an excuse for parades through the streets of the city and many nights of parties that go on to the wee hours of the morning.
Entrance to the Biblioteca Joanina. The library houses around 60,000 books published between the 16th and 19th centuries.
Flyer mailed to residents in the Ferreira do Zezere municipality shows Socialist Party mayoral candidate Bruno Gomes against a peaceful green back ground with the message “It’s time for change” and “New generation, New vision.”
Portugal is gently gearing up for local elections which will be held on Sept. 26. I say gently, because I have been used to the increasingly savage cut and thrust of US-style election campaigns where character assassination is pretty much the name of the game.
Here in my part of Central Portugal, campaign billboard signs began appearing a few months ago. Most of those I’ve seen are a restful shade of green, rather like the color of a hearty pea soup.
A week ago, a flyer arrived in my mailbox from Bruno Gomes, the Socialist Party candidate. Portugal has multiple political parties. The Socialist Party (Partido Socialist) is a major party, whose leader is António Costa, the current prime minister. Gomes is campaigning to become president of the municipal chamber – essentially the mayor – of Ferreira do Zezere.
Portugal has 308 municipalities which are centered in a town and have jurisdiction over the villages in the rural area around them. As local government units, they consist of the Municipal Chamber (câmara municipal ) of elected members who have executive power, and an elected legislative body called a Municipal Assembly (Assembleia Municipal ) whose members meet five times a year. At a lower level, villages have their own governing unit called a junta de freguesia.
The flyer I received from Gomes, was inviting potential voters to a meeting on 4th of July. Portugal allows EU citizens resident in the country to vote in local elections. Since I am a dual passport holder, my second one being Irish which is an EU country, I could theoretically register.
What struck me as so refreshing about this flyer, was the calm, measured tone of the candidate’s platform. Under the heading “A Time for Change”, he lists nine proposals. They include things like support for families to cover the cost of childcare, simplifying the processes to approve new businesses and those needed to issue building permits. They are, essentially, sensible ideas that could really benefit people. What a concept!
I am glad to be living in a country where candidates can talk about the issues rather than smearing their opponents. So, although the I probably won’t attend the meeting on 4th of July, I will think of it as a different way to celebrate.
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