TAVIRA, PORTUGAL

This is near the end of winter so Portugal’s beach resort towns on the southern coast are pretty empty right now. The weather is nice enough, but it’s definitely too cold for the beach with daytime highs in the 60s and lows in the 40s. Rick Steves recommends a small town in the Algarve region (Algarve comes from Arabic for West as this used to be the western-most part of the Arab world during the Moorish days, interestingly enough). My next major destination was Seville, Spain and Tavira about a little more than halfway there so I decided to give it a whirl.

I took a €17, 4-hour train ride to the city of Faro and switched to an awaiting train the goes along the coast. Thirty minutes later I arrived in the serene coastal village of Tavira without a hotel reservation, but also with no worries since it is off-season. I first walked across the river to a cheap, recommended hotel that would have been about €20 per night, but the front door was locked and the man running the restaurant below it said the woman must be out for lunch. I walked a couple blocks to another recommended hotel and checked into a very nice €30 room overlooking the calm river that runs through town. I don’t know what the first place would have been like, but having a scenic river view seemed like it was probably worth the extra money this time. My hotel had about 20 rooms and it looked like 3 in total were being rented.

I felt very few tourists in town and the calmness was almost overwhelming, but in a good way. After a short nap I walked around town and took a few snapshots. The main attraction of the town is a sandbar just a short boat ride away that draws lots of people during summer, but off season you have castle ruins and a cathedral, neither particularly notable. I saw the castle ruins through the locked gate, but arrived too late to enter the cathedral, no big loss anyway. That evening I took my laptop to an Internet café a block from my hotel and plugged in to do some writing work and so forth.

Tavira was definitely a nice town to stop in for a short break from the city scouring that trips like this usually consist of. It was cheap and also very nice to be in a place without the checklist attractions that beckon every traveler whether you are interested in them or not. It was also very nice to get a glimpse of a traditional town that isn’t spoiled by having a giant tourism infrastructure. This is why Rick Steves recommends Tavira instead of the half-dozen or so nearby towns that draw all the package tourists.

Before I landed in Europe on this trip I had considered getting a Eurail Flexi Pass, which allows 10 days of travel in a 60-day period for $692, in first class. That option didn’t sound terrible, especially in light of the climb of the Euro versus the greenback. It obviously meant that I would be saving money if my travel days would otherwise cost more than $70 each, at least for first class. I decided against doing that because I know there are sometimes deals to be had locally that are often quite cheap. For example in Germany you can travel on the slower trains in the weekends for next to nothing, even covering long distances. Already I knew I had made the right choice since my first Portuguese train ride cost a bit over $20 and my next leg actually goes a place where the train doesn’t go, so a $15 bus ride will get me to Seville in only a few hours. The trains in France will not be this cheap, but I am sure this was the way to go, if only for the added flexibility.

I woke up the next morning in Tavira and walked 5 minutes to the bus terminal across the river with a few minutes to spare for the 9:05 bus to Seville, which didn’t even pull in until 9:25, but that is common here, or so I hear. Neither the trains nor buses here are very crowded this time of year so I am always able to sit at a window with no one in the seat next to me. A few hours later the bus pulled into one of the terminals in Seville and I was officially in Spain for the first time.