Saying Goodbye to the Best Thing That Ever Happened to Me
Letting go of my own private Portugal
It was a bright and sunny winter’s morning in a quiet, peaceful corner of rural Portugal. I had just started exploring the area from the passenger seat of a car. The window was wound down, so I could feel the crisp winter breeze as I sat there gawping at the slowly passing views of hilly terrain. I caught whiffs of damp humus-rich soil, of sheep and eucalyptus.
The ride over the dirt tracks was bumpy and slow, giving me time to focus on some of the details in the distance. An old man in a hat who reminded me of Fidel Castro led a plough mule over a field of dark brown soil. The air was tinged with the smell of burning firewood as smoke poured out of the chimney of an isolated house. A woman wearing a black headscarf to match the rest of her black attire stood hunched forward at a water well as chickens and geese ran about her feet.
On the day of the viewing, as soon as the engine of the car stopped, I took a moment to enjoy the tranquillity. Birds were singing. The tinny clink of bells punctuated the sound of bleating sheep — a shepherd was leading his flock ahead of us on the path. He would later become a good friend and his flock would graze on my land whenever I was away.
The plot was small but tucked away out of sight. It was a few hundred metres from the main track, down a terraced slope with a view of a cork oak woodland on the hills opposite. The old stone ruin was on one of the upper terraces, so it had a bit of a vantage point. There was a sense of intimacy about the place, of purity too. Most of the surrounding land was abandoned, so it felt very private. This was deep mid-winter so of course the scene would be very different in July or August, as I’d later discover. But I just knew it straight away and felt it deep within me. This was where I was meant to be. My own private Portugal.
It was the first place I saw, so the estate agent wanted to show me more. I went along, needless to say, out of politeness more than anything else. I just couldn’t fathom the possibility of anything better, at least not within my modest budget. But I managed to keep an open mind — for three whole days.
The deal was then sealed and with my short trip now over, I left Portugal and set about planning a more long-term return. I didn’t feel at all daunted by the prospect of moving abroad. I had spent most of my adult life travelling independently, living in five foreign countries across two continents prior to Portugal. I knew what I could expect in terms of settling in or adapting. I didn’t speak much Portuguese, but I could get by in four other languages (English, German, Spanish and Greek) and always relished the opportunity to face new linguistic challenges.
But there were some fundamental differences with the journey I was about to embark on. For the first time ever, I was moving to a very rural location, where I didn’t know a single soul. At the time, back in 2011, there were only one or two other foreign migrants in my village, according to local rumour, but I hadn’t met them myself. Facebook already existed, but back then it felt more like a tool to keep in touch with people far way. There were certainly no local groups I was aware of connecting people in the area.
In terms of employment, I was still active as a freelancer working from home with an income stream from other countries, but there was little scope of working locally with the sort of thing I did. I also knew I would be relatively cut off due to lack of public transport, which is a big factor for someone who has never even driven a car. What’s more, I didn’t actually have a home to move into — my new residence would be nothing more than a tent in an open field, at least to begin with. In short, I was stepping out of all my comfort zones in one fell swoop, and that’s what made this journey so different to the others I’d been on.
But the small plot of land I bought did not feel ‘foreign’ to me in any way. It quickly became my home, my school, my refuge and my personal battlefield. I also felt welcomed in a close-knit community where most people treated me with kindness at first, despite my being a bit of an oddity.
My neighbour would usually stand at the fence giving me instructions about how to grow things. She also told me stories about her ancestors, the people who had once given life to the abandoned fields around us.
“Nos tempos do meu pai e o pai do meu pai…”
She would talk to me as if I was a child fresh out of pre-verbal infancy. In a way, this was helpful because my Portuguese really wasn’t that great at the time. There were gaps in my understanding of her stories, which I filled with details drawn from the memory bank of my own family history. Her tales or explanations triggered thoughts and images of my Cypriot ancestors working the land. It was my grandmother who I saw there, hunched forward, tilling the soil with an enxada, whenever my neighbour tried to demonstrate how it was done. The way you held the tool was important, she said, the angle in relation to the soil, the direction in which you went about your business, the speed at which you moved. This was not work, but a dance with Mother Nature. These were not just lessons from the here and now, but lessons from my ancestral past.
And so it was that I tended to my field with atavistic passion and pride. I felt that every cell in my body had been brought into the world for this. I didn’t just plant potatoes and beans. I didn’t just practise permaculture. I didn’t just scrape a living for myself. I took my enxada and carved my signature onto the land.
The village I left was not the same one which I travelled to a decade earlier. The influx of mainly foreign migrants that I witnessed was staggeringly huge. For better or worse, intentionally or unintentionally, we all changed the place beyond recognition.
I believe the vast majority of newcomers were honest, decent, well-intentioned folk just going about their lives and minding their own business. Many tried to integrate or get on with the locals as best they could, even when their subcultures were radically different to the traditional Portuguese way of life. The natives, in my experience, were on the whole welcoming and inclusive people.
Even though I still own my house and land in Portugal, I haven’t been back there since I left the country in February 2020. The reasons for this are too complex and personal to go into here, yet it’s invariably what people want to know when I start to tell them my story.
Saying goodbye was hard, for sure. My time in Portugal remains without doubt the most cherished period of my life. But transformative adventures such as these are never really over. The end of one journey heralds the beginning of another and I no longer feel the pain of parting but the thrill of heading to pastures new.
And so my journey continues with a profound sense of achievement. Nothing can take away the wealth of knowledge and experience I have gained. I have been personally enriched in ways I could never have imagined. The skills I’ve acquired are transferable. The lessons I’ve learned are mobile. I carry them with me wherever I go and that, for me, is priceless.
