Author: Teresa Vilas Boas

Cycling In Paradise: a tour with Portugal Best Cycling   Portugal is seldom seen in peoples top five list of places to visit – which is a shame.  Portugal is a beautiful county filled with restaurants that all feel like they are serving their best version of local dishes and national wines, some of the best urban and rural vistas of historic sites ranging from the Neolithic era through the Moorish occupancy up to the modern era, and people that make you welcome no matter where you go.   One of the best ways to experience a county is by bicycle, which gives you more time to encounter the people, the food, the wine and the history that infuses every place you ride.  Think I am exaggerating?  Try riding thru a small farming town where almost everyone greets you with ‘bom dia’ (good morning in Portuguese), or stopping at a small local café in your riding shorts and shirt and hearing a farmer dressed in sweater and corduroy pants ask your guide “  Where are your friends from, don’t they know it’s not summer yet?”.  How about picking a restaurant at random in the World Heritage Site city of Evora for the best grilled sardines (quarter pound each) you have ever had with a locally produced white wine that would win a prize back home.  And this was after a morning ride to see the Cromeleque dos Almendres (cromlechs are rocks in an oval formation similar to Stonehenge) dating from 5500 BC which are thought to be the oldest in Europe  - older than Stonehenge.  We then had a pleasant ride thru a cork tree forest, stopping to see the Anta Grande do Zambujeiro – a dolmen (burial tomb) thought to be the tallest of its kind and dating between