300 Days of Sun

Travel Guide

The author talks Portugal:

First impressions were of fading elegance scarred by signs of hard times, graffiti and ‘closing down’ notices. Most people passed through – or avoided the town altogether – on the way to golf courses and famous rocky beaches of the Algarve coast.

Back in the streets behind the marina, I began to look more closely at the once-grand buildings that were now shut up, businesses closed. The most prominent of these was the Café Alianҫa and the mustard-yellow shops that adjoined it, in a prime position facing the lively marina. The sense of gentle decay was compelling, and I longed to know more. What was life really like here, behind the pretty houses covered in cracked tiles – azulejos – and crumbling stucco?

And why was grass growing from so many of the window sills and high ledges? When I realised that these shaggy tufts were birds’ nests, I stopped under one of the largest examples, on the pediment of the gateway to the Old Town, and asked someone. ‘Storks,’ he said. ‘They can return to the same nest for many years.’

After that, I started to go out with a notebook as well as a camera. Readers tell me that my novels have a powerful sense of place, and that is achieved by close observation. I’ve always been an observer of the quirky as well as the quintessential, and I simply write down what I see – on the spot, if possible. All the descriptions in 300 Days of Sun come from jottings in that notebook.

The Café Alianҫa, I discovered was once the grandest, most cosmopolitan café on the Algarve, visited by Simone de Beauvoir in 1945. At the time I was there, it had been closed for several years, still elegant, but sad and neglected. As in the book, the ground floor was being used for public discussions as part of a local election campaign.