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sister_luckI'm still not quite done with the Portugal pictures - I keep posting them to remember the holidays. As there is only one more school day (which we'll spend on a field trip) until the autumn break, I should really post some today!
Here have some really tall cork oaks:
That link tells you that 50% of the cork harvested annually comes from Portugal.
When driving around the Algarve's hinterland, you will see these big piles of cork bark:
If you take a picture of them from a moving car, that's what they look like.
We did go to a lovely cork museum in São Brás de Alportel, which also had a great section on (regional) costume in the villa of a 'cork baron'. People got rich really quickly when the cork industry took off, but lost their wealth equally quickly with technical advances in the processing of the cork. I don't have pictures to show you because it was on our last day when we were already on our way to the airport and I only took pictures with my phone - which I lost when it played up again. We enjoyed the museum very much - especially because they also have a working water wheel so typical of the region, of which you now only see rusted remains in the fields.
Anyway, in a different town, in Monchique there are several huge cork oaks which are obviously very old, next to the ruins of the convent above the town.
The last harvest was in 2013, as indicated by the 3. Not all of the bark is removed and green moss grows on the huge limbs of the tree.
The convent in the background gives you an idea of the scale of the tree. Most other cork oak trees you see around are not even a third the size of these giants.
We had a lovely picnic under the canopy of the tree in the shade after walking up there in the sun.
We had been there before on our first visit in 2007 and had encountered a strange wildhaired and bearded man with a guitar. He was there again, half way up the hill, the guitar nowhere in sight, but the cover was on the ground and he obviously expected a donation. We weren't fast enough for him, so he shouted Motherfucker after us.
This time, we didn't visit the convent - a family lives in it and there is an old man who shows you around in exchange for buying some of his garden's produce, but it is a fairly wild place and I didn't want the kid running around in there. Also, that old man was a little strange, too - speaking gibberish consisting of lots of bits and pieces of all sorts of languages and waving his arms around a lot. If you want to see what it looked like inside, here are the pictures.
Here have some really tall cork oaks:
That link tells you that 50% of the cork harvested annually comes from Portugal.
When driving around the Algarve's hinterland, you will see these big piles of cork bark:
If you take a picture of them from a moving car, that's what they look like.
We did go to a lovely cork museum in São Brás de Alportel, which also had a great section on (regional) costume in the villa of a 'cork baron'. People got rich really quickly when the cork industry took off, but lost their wealth equally quickly with technical advances in the processing of the cork. I don't have pictures to show you because it was on our last day when we were already on our way to the airport and I only took pictures with my phone - which I lost when it played up again. We enjoyed the museum very much - especially because they also have a working water wheel so typical of the region, of which you now only see rusted remains in the fields.
Anyway, in a different town, in Monchique there are several huge cork oaks which are obviously very old, next to the ruins of the convent above the town.
The last harvest was in 2013, as indicated by the 3. Not all of the bark is removed and green moss grows on the huge limbs of the tree.
The convent in the background gives you an idea of the scale of the tree. Most other cork oak trees you see around are not even a third the size of these giants.
We had a lovely picnic under the canopy of the tree in the shade after walking up there in the sun.
We had been there before on our first visit in 2007 and had encountered a strange wildhaired and bearded man with a guitar. He was there again, half way up the hill, the guitar nowhere in sight, but the cover was on the ground and he obviously expected a donation. We weren't fast enough for him, so he shouted Motherfucker after us.
This time, we didn't visit the convent - a family lives in it and there is an old man who shows you around in exchange for buying some of his garden's produce, but it is a fairly wild place and I didn't want the kid running around in there. Also, that old man was a little strange, too - speaking gibberish consisting of lots of bits and pieces of all sorts of languages and waving his arms around a lot. If you want to see what it looked like inside, here are the pictures.
