We love oceans – especially big ones like the Atlantic – mainly for the stunning coastline carved out by wild waves and crisp cold waters.

To me, a dip in the Med can feel a bit like soaking in soup, and although here it’s sometimes quite bracing, the North Sea it ain’t and the ocean’s a wonderful 20C+ at the moment.

One of our early options – as we searched for a place to call home in Portugal – was a move to the interior of Alentejo, closer to the winelands that nestle up to the Spanish border.

The rolling hills and castles and monasteries streuseled around the countryside were a huge attraction, were it not for the swealtering summer temperatures.

Half an hour or so east and the mercury starts rising...further still and the thermometers can head 10 to 12C higher than here on the coast.

We found a place we could afford – far enough up from the Algarve to avoid stag dos and hen nights and south enough of Comporta to steer clear of Clooney and Kidman, the French designer crowd and the super-wealthy arrivals who have followed.

It might be the busiest time of year here, but our definition of crowded isn’t Mallorca – there’s always space on the beach even at high tide and especially in some of our more secret spots.

We feel the moderating influence of the ocean in the winter as well, and this year the natural air conditioning of our prevailing NW wind has created the kind of microclimate we are grateful for every day.

While the rest of Europe has been sweating it out under heat domes, the only thing we are properly toasting is our decision to move here.

The 300+ days of sunshine was the attraction – especially when moving somewhere off the grid – but as climate change starts messing with everything, it seems we have found a sweet spot.

And thankfully I can report another so-far-so-good summer where some fascinating people from all over the world have somehow discovered us, despite our still embryonic efforts at marketing.

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Discretion is the best part of valuing a hidden getaway like ours, but without giving too much away we’ve welcomed a South African constitutional court judge, an ambassador, a two-time Oscar nominee who works with Ridley Scott, a former Cambridge Analytica employee turned screenwriter, an author and journalism professor, a top Dutch musician and a huge number of fabulous and fascinating folk from all different walks of life.

The calendar is full of colour, including patches of red which indicate people arriving into rooms other guests are leaving on the same day.

We’ve found some cleaners to help take the pressure off Krishna who also has to keep an eye on the irrigation system and make sure the vineyard stays alive.

A patch of vines took a turn for the worse and the prognosis from our friend Niels was mildew. After a bit of treatment, green shoots are emerging from plants I’d written off and being dead, and hopefully the bulk of them will survive the summer and thrive enough to store up some umph to see them through winter and a start the Spring strong.

The calendar is still looking pretty hectic, but we do have a few gaps in the last week of August...if you’re tempted to swap a heatwave for some Atlantic waves and pay us a visit.

There’s still some space on our next wine retreat at the start of October as well, and with a few retreats in our diary we have no complaints in just our second year of business.

Well, apart from my foot of course…

Spiking it on a sharp root, deep in the forest while wearing highly inappropriate footware was clearly my own fault, but that doesn’t make it hurt any less.

Two weeks and a couple of courses of antibiotics later, and it’s still curbing my usual enthusiasm. I can understand why torturers like to focus on the feet.

The MRI scan came back this week and thankfully proved I’m not going soft in my old age and there is actually a piece of wood 2.5cm long lodged deep in my foot between a couple of metatarsals.

If it had been nothing more than “heavy bruising” I’m not sure I could have got away with putting my feet up and abandoning Ana and Oda to the daily breakfast routine and the regular runarounds for recycling and re-supply.

But despite it all we’ve continued to fire on all cylinders, keeping our people in pancakes and our clients in croissants, cakes and coffee with thanks to the irrepressible Krishna and the fabulous José.

There’s much more to write about the brilliant Erasmus young entrepreneurs scheme which brought the man from Grand Canaria to our door, and every project his season has had José’s hand in it.

Oda’s bartending experience in Los Angeles has also brought a twist and a shake to proceedings with her weekly cocktail nights.

We hosted guests and friends for an Eclipse viewing party, and while only 93% totality it was still quite a spectacle through the special spectacles I’d ordered through Amazon.

I particularly like the way the light slipped into the perfect smiley as the moon made its way across the sun.

We always try to celebrate the Perseid meteor shower every year as well, and the peak of the performance was the same night as the eclipse, so one thing slipped easily into the other as we turned off the lights – cocktails in hand – and watched the shooting stars criss-crossing the sky.

And everyone has been enthusiastically tucking into our new white wine – Mauro’s fabulous blend of Arinto, Fernão Pires and Gewũrztraminer with its label lovingly designed by Oda.

It depicts our favourite beach, Garfunkel and the recently departed Simon staring out to sea and is a lovely tribute to our much-missed mutt.

It was a big space to fill, but somehow Ronaldo Romulus the first is managing to fill it and remains just cute enough to get away with an astonishing level of puppy destruction.

And there’s nothing like hosting a wedding for the first time – with 100 guests – to focus the mind.

“Sure,” I waved, “we’ll build a deck there, and throw up a shade over the front of the Clubhouse for the meal, no bother.”

It’s all so much easier said than done...but once committed, the plans had to be drawn up, the materials decided upon and delivered, and the drilling, cutting, hammering and screwing all performed around visitors here for a peaceful getaway.

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There’ve been many deadlines already this year: removing weeds, planting trees, shrubs, herbs, vegetables and grapes in that little window between clay soil being mud and it turning concrete.

There’s been some building work, running repairs ahead of the season, raised bed making, container beautifying and competitive grass cutting, all complicated by the conflicting demands of an early start early to avoid the heat, but not wanting guests to wake up to the far-from-soothing sound of a two-stroke engine.

And so began a whirlwind month of woodworking and physics to create a deck suspended over the hillside and a shade to withstand the wonderful wind from the Atlantic which – even in a heatwave – air-conditions our valley every afternoon.

A hundred guests sounds a stretch for an off-grid place like ours, but with a fabulous caterer taking care of the meal service, a top audio engineer to make the most of a very talented DJ and a brilliant barman to keep the drinks flowing...I think all would agree it was an absolute triumph.

I’ve built decks before, but every time I start on a new project it’s like I’ve forgotten everything I’ve ever learned and have to start all over again.

I have to throw myself back into the YouTube videos and reconsider all the options for how to secure the foundations, which screws and supports to use, and how strong everything needs to be.

The first decision was to make the platform a lot bigger than was needed for a wedding ceremony – so it could be repurposed as a starlit-sky dining deck, a yoga platform or a performance space.

There was sloping ground to contend with, hard clay to drill into and planks of wood up to 5m long to manage.

In situations involving structural integrity I always go overboard...something we didn’t want the bride and groom doing off the back of the deck and down the hillside, and so a rope safety barrier was added to the design.

Amid a flurry of back-of-the-envelope calculations and help from Eduardo at the local farm supplies store, Krishna, José and I juggled string and stakes, spirit levels and cement to create a new space with a stunning view.

But that was the easy bit – the shade over our calçada cobblestone deck proved to be even more of a challenge.

When we built the place, the Clubhouse was designed around an uninterrupted view, requiring a gigantic reinforced concrete beam to support a 9m span without any posts disturbing the skyline.

So we needed something strong enough to support more than 48 square metres of coconut fibre sails...but which could also be removed in the winter.

Not wanting to dig up our beautiful cobbles we decided to use wine barrels filled with gravel to anchor the two posts which couldn’t be dug half a metre down.

And after experimenting with different sized pipes and tubes, I discovered the joining sections of 110mm wastewater pipe was just the right size to provide a concrete-secured hole for the posts to be temporarily wedged into.

With thanks to our winemaking friend Mauro Azóia for sourcing the barrels, our Stirling Architecture prize-winning pal Alex de Rijke for integrity of structure...and Isaac Newton of course for his underrated work on equal and opposite forces...we somehow succeeded in creating something both beautiful and effective.

The guests appeared as if a fashion shoot had arrived in the valley. They watched the ceremony in the shade, they lunched under cover, they partied into the sunset and danced in fading light under a full moon.

The VIP toilets trailered in for an off-grid celebration were fabulous, but Ana’s idea of us building a luxurious “loo with the view” to help us with big events was a great take-away.

I do love a project...I wonder what YouTube has to say about that?

With thanks to Chef Maria and the whole amazing catering team; Maria’s friend Lotte and her husband Auke who helped deliver a wonderful service; to Anton’s bar; Ricardo on sound...and of course to the beautiful bride Ina and dashing groom Niels for trusting us with their big day.

Their guests were brilliant, dressed to the nines and we were flattered and humbled by the kind comments from their group of friends we were lucky enough to host at Vale das Estrelas for the whole weekend.

We learned so much and were filled with inspiration about what we can create in the future.

Sadly we didn’t need to make a speech filled with such a long list of thank yous at the awards gala we attended – despite all the votes we received from our wonderful readers we didn’t take the top prize.

But we were delighted just to be there – to be nominated for a media award for our podcast series about wine – at the Portuguese Association of Hotels, Restaurants e Similar (AHRESP).

It was a fantastic night out at the Estoril Casino outside of Lisbon – the place which inspired Ian Fleming’s Casino Royal – and an interesting gathering of the great and the good of Portugal’s hospitality industry.

It was a great chance to dress up for the city instead of the countryside, to catch up with a few good friends and to pick up the much-needed wine barrels...and our new own-label white wine.

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Yes, with Mauro the winemaker and Oda the label designer (and before the labels have even arrived) we’ve already been wowing guests with our new white wine which is a wonderful blend of Portuguese grapes Arinto, Fernão Pires and the wonderfully flowery Gewürztraminer.

And while I’ll be writing more about our wines and our rapidly growing vineyard in my other blog about Portuguese wines, here’s a plug for the next two wine retreats we are running in collaboration with the Hutchins Wine Academy – in early October 2026 and in April/May 2027.

Hwa X Vde Wine Retreat October 2026

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Please join us...and if you can’t make it, please spread the love among all your friends – the first one was amazing.

And finally...and in our spare time...we have been introducing Ronaldo Romulus the first to the household.

The little mutt of a dog who was born on April 1^st is no joke to the other animals – asserting himself with the confidence of a small dog with big paws to grow into.

We were introduced to “Ronnie” at just six weeks old – one of a litter of unexpected arrivals to a Portuguese farming couple near São Luís.

He’s a cute little demon with sharp teeth who loves to chew...and he’s brilliantly turned everything upside down.

Oda named him (I asked permission to add “the first” as I liked the way it sounded), but in Portugal’s first World Cup football match we were worried that Ronaldo might not be as popular a name as it used to be!

The ups and downs of the tournament and Portugal’s ageing superstar are a constant cause of concern for our small dog and the reputation of his namesake, but he’s coping quite well so far.

And he’s adjusting well to head of marketing and entertainment.

Why tell everyone about how wonderful the views are, how cool it is here by the ocean while the rest of Iberia bakes, and how welcome you’ll be in the Valley of the Stars...when we can just say: “We have a cute puppy.”

So come and see him now...don’t leave it until Ronaldo’s an old dog struggling to fetch a ball!

Come and see us in sunny Alentejo and enjoy the ocean breeze…book here.

As a hack I do like headlines.

“I met Ana playing tennis with her husband...but we got together through clowns and fire,” is a favourite introduction to our love story. More about that another time.

Oda and Ana found Simon cowering under a table at a fabulous little dog rescue place called Bark n’ Bitches in Los Angeles in early 2012.

Having arrived in LA from Bangkok six months earlier we had made a few attempts to adopt a dog directly from a shelter, but baffled by bureaucracy which made it extremely difficult to find one, the girls looked elsewhere.

Bark n’ Bitches was a strange blend of animal accessory shop and zoo, where the dogs were all off leash to hang out with each other and interact with the hopeful foster parents looking for their soul mate, or dæmon if you’re a Philip Pullman His Dark Materials fan.

It was a chaos of yapping and blurred movement, all with one member of staff on hand with a mop and bucket to deal with any accidents and an air-lock style double door to stop escapees racing out into the Fairfax and Melrose traffic.

But the dogs could be themselves, not frightened or over-compensating animals alone in a cage at the pound, competing with their neighbours to be rescued.

I was working away and we wanted us to decide on a dog together...but Simon was incredibly cute and the owners warned he’d soon be snapped up, so after a quick call, the adoption was agreed by all parties and the small ball of fur was brought home.

We don’t know much about the first three months or so of his life – we picked November 15^th as his birthday – but for years he was petrified of metal dustbins and Hispanic men.

I presume you’re still wondering where Drew Barrymore comes into all this?

Well, she adopted a dog called Oliver from the same place the next day...so Simon had almost certainly sniffed the ass of the Golden Globe-winning actor’s dog.

I mean we don’t send each other Christmas cards or anything, but we’re close like that 🤞and definitely related.

And so the only American in the family learned to walk off-leash with Ana on the streets of LA, not to beg and – honest to his Hollywood roots – learned to perform a series of tricks from “high five” to “bang” where a finger gun persuaded him to play dead.

(The initial trigger word for training was “die” but I questioned that one, as Ana and Oda were shouting it over and over again while rolling him over and popping treats in his mouth. I feared the police might be called).

He developed his jaunty walk in Los Feliz during the four years Oda spent at the nearby High School and we all lived in California together, and surprised himself – and us – one day when a nearby LA fire truck siren sent him into an involuntary howl and look of confusion which we forever tried to recreate elsewhere through YouTube.

These wonderful little animals are so interwoven with our lives – constant companions – and it’s only after they have gone that you realise all the moments, big and small, that we shared together.

Simon was part of almost half of Oda’s life thus far, and was well-travelled, moving from LA to Nairobi, from Nairobi back to northern California via a summer in Sweden, and then to here in Portugal in the middle of COVID.

The story of Simon’s life is the story of most of the time Ana and I have spent together, and it’s a long story...too long to write about here...and amid a grief that is deep, I can do little more but share some memories.

Oda used to joke Simon was my son, and this is certainly the hardest blog I’ve written so far. It’s taken me a few weeks to put down on paper.

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Simon was ring-bearer at our friends’ outdoor LA wedding...complete with a tux, top hat and small ring box attached to his collar.

Ana dispatched him down the red carpet towards the happy couple whom he knew and loved, I lured him offstage with dried chicken jerky and it’s only by the grace of dog that a squirrel didn’t distract him and throw the whole ceremony into a human/dog/squirrel farce.

In the heat of one Palm Springs summer we had to buy some emergency protective rubber shoes which turned him into Spider Dog at the nearby Joshua Tree boulder park...leaping between rocks he defied gravity for 15 minutes until they were worn through.

We tried to instil in Simon our love of fancy dress, but as he aged and understood we were laughing at him rather than with him, he developed a very effective strategy for countering such humiliation.

Dressed as a T-rex, a lobster, a Christmas elf...or in any of the other costumes we acquired...he would simply stand still and look miserable until we took it off.

Only the matching Kenyan shirts Ana bought for Simon and I were acceptable...probably because they were quite nice shirts.

It was a full life: he was kidnapped by the FBI, was almost killed by a tick in Kenya which left him with a weak liver which is probably what got him in the end.

We hiked the Hollywood hills of Griffith Park, ran the tracks of Karura Forest, and explored the Portuguese countryside and coastline together...although he was always more comfortable in Lisbon checking his pee-mail, inhaling gasoline fumes and being the city dog he was born to be.

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Ever the California shade monkey, on the beach he would race ahead to steal a stranger’s towel while they swam, and after cooling off would check if they had any chicken.

I prolapsed a disk helping him fight off a slum dog in Kenya, and during our year at Stanford he delighted (almost as much as I did) in pooping on rich people’s lawns in Palo Alto...and developed a brief desire to act like a dog and fetch a ball. It didn’t last long.

At our Nairobi house parties he would slink upstairs for an early night, despite our bar being named after him (the “Dog and Hound” sign beneath a clock bearing our faces always prompted the question “which one’s the dog and which one’s the hound.”)

A week before he died, with faltering health, eyesight and hearing, he dragged himself all on his own up the hill from our house to join a late night party...his last.

He died a little before 8.30 in the morning on the last day of our wine retreat. As he was breathing his last, our neighbour Daniel took an amazing photograph of a rainbow in our valley. A weird wind whipped through the house as he slipped away.

After our retreat guests had left, we dug as deep a hole as we could in the hardened clay...and then we dug it a little deeper until our hands were sore.

We went to buy an olive tree, stopped off at one of his favourite beaches to take some time to remember, and then came home to place him in the ground and plant the tree above his grave.

The spot we chose reflected our happiest memory of headstrong, independent Simon – that same jaunty walk developed in LA, tail wagging, as he made his regular morning trips up the drive to visit our neighbour Daniel, where he would bark at the door for a better breakfast than ours.

Tree planted, we sat back to pour a little beer on the soil, say cheers and thank you to our wonderful little dog – our Sssssssimon, our SiFi, our puppy – for all the wonderful years of companionship he had given us.

We hung his Kenyan, bead-work rainbow collar on the tree and as we looked up a huge rainbow spread across the sky.

Being neither religious, nor particularly superstitious, we just enjoyed one of those beautiful moments that provide people faith in something greater than ourselves. Simon’s rainbow above Simon’s tree.

Next morning I walked up to the spot, cried a little and then turned around to see another giant rainbow behind me above the house.

Let’s just call it his farewell.

We haven’t seen a rainbow since...except on the little collar that still hangs on Simon’s tree that we drive past every day and sometimes walk to for one of the most beautiful views of our valley.

I’ll make a bench soon to place there. We’ve always wanted to use that space. We will be able to sit and contemplate the lives we shared – the unquestioning love and joy he brought to our nomadic lives – and the companionship he shared with us in our Portuguese home.

As he declined in health, a good friend told us it’s our responsibility to give a dog a good life, but also a good death. When he stopped eating and drinking, did we really want him alone in a sterile veterinary hospital to be put on a drip and kept alive?

When my father was dying I had fought the hospital hard for the energy drinks and liquid foods to give him more strength to keep him alive. Thankfully a doctor suggested perhaps it would be better to let him slip away. We had said our farewells. It was good advice.

If you met Simon and have any memories or photos of him you’d like to share please send them to me…I’m going to do a little YouTube collage for us to remember him.

We made Simon as comfortable as we could. Ana sang him old Swedish songs, I urged him to let go. He had a good life, and dying in our arms, I believe we gave him a good death.

It’s the first time I have lost a dog. As everyone who has lost a dog knows already, it is hard – it is proper grief – especially perhaps when the grief over the loss of family – of people – has perhaps been pushed down and put off for another time.

My only remaining family is on Ana’s side.

One friend said he finally understood why as a child there was a “gap between dogs” as his parents grieved. One approach is leaving time before falling in love with a little ball of fur all over again, knowing our lifespans are out of synch.

Another is continuity – our other two dogs have helped comfort us, despite Garfunkel’s name now being much harder to explain. Let’s go with Garfie.

Through chance, circumstance, luck and perhaps with a little help from a rainbow, we stumbled across Ronnie this week...or Ronaldo Romulus to spell out the full name which Oda gave him.

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Ronnie was born on April 1^st and is less of a daemon and more of a pure demon.

As I write Albie and Garfunkel have fled the house to avoid his yapping, pin-sharp teeth nibbling and general annoyance.

He is joy and energy and love. I’ll tell you more about him next time.

The main tourism and hospitality association in Portugal, AHRESP, has shortlisted our podcast series Ana & Al’s Big Portuguese Wine Adventure for their “Media & Comunicação no Turismo” (tourism media and communication) award, but it all rests on a popular vote.

VOTE NOW!

If you haven’t voted yet, it’s easy…but today is your last chance. Please help us win!

All you have to do is click on the Vote Now button, put in your name and email address (so they know we’re not cheating). The video above tells you how to vote, but it’s not difficult…

VOTE NOW!

We’re the third category and the first option. Click on “Ana & Al’s Big Portuguese Wine Adventure”, scroll down and admit to not being a robot (and maybe Google a Portuguese word to work out which images to select), before clicking to register your vote.

Oh, and if you haven’t listened to the podcast yet, you can find it in all the usual places…or on the other Substack blog The Big Portuguese Wine Adventure:

The Big Portuguese Wine Adventure

A journey through Portuguese vineyards collecting stories and learning to make wine

By Alastair Leithead

Thanks so much…I’ll be back very soon with an update from the Valley of the Stars…and don’t forget to get all your friends to vote and follow our journey too!

Thanks,

Vote for us HERE!

The word “retreat” gets bandied around quite a bit in these parts, usually preceded by the words yoga, tai chi or tantric.

But ever the mavericks, we went out on a limb and chose wine to prefix ours.

And so the first Wine Retreat at the Valley of the Stars was held last weekend...and it was a rip-roaring success.

We had a full house of guests from self-proclaimed wine beginners, to a couple so obsessed with vinho that their dog’s called Pinot (Noir)...and we even had a qualified sommelier join the course which was held in partnership with the Hutchins Wine Academy.

Joanna Hutchins led the daily and sometimes twice-daily masterclasses, teaching participants how to “Taste Like a Somm,” blind-sampling “noble grapes” on her way into the wonderful world of Portuguese wine – with its 350 grape varieties, many of which are a lot easier to drink than they are to pronounce.

Would-be wine aficionados used Joanna’s wine compass to learn how to talk about what they’re tasting, before learning which Portuguese grapes relate to the famous varieties they’ve had before.

There were what-goes-with-what classes and a wine-pairing dinner along the lines of “what grows together goes together” and then participants were encouraged to define “their core wine identity” at the end of the four day retreat.

We kept everyone well fed and entertained between classes, with a Portuguese wine story-tasting and taking them all to the nearby Vicentino for a tour of the vineyard and new winery by its fabulous winemaker Ana Rita Bouça.

We tried to give everyone a chance to enjoy the peace and quiet and explore the region, hiking down the valley to our friend Jorge’s medronho distillery for a tour and a tasting.

Ana was queen of the kitchen, creating three fantastic meals a day and pulling out all the stops to keep the tasters on track

I did my best to keep the charcoals hot for black pork and grilled fish, and we were blown away by how so many people from such different backgrounds bonded over the (many) bottles.

Aged from 30 to 90, participants travelled from as far away as North Carolina and Shanghai to this wild west coast of Portugal’s Alentejo and tasted well in excess of 50 different wines.

Among them was Prof Bob Lauterborn – one of the original Mad Men (“I drank beer rather than martinis”) whose academic work led him to create the famous marketing discipline of “the four Cs” (Consumer, Cost, Convenience & Communication).

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This was a joint 90^th birthday and pre-wedding trip with his grandson Evan.

We had ex-journalists – a former BBC colleague – business folk and a fabulous American couple who have recently retired to Portugal from the US.

It was a first for us all, but we were delighted with the way it went...and the wonderful feedback we received from the pioneer gang of wine retreaters.

We enjoyed it so much we’re already getting excited about the next one we will be hosting in October.

Running from 1^st-5^th it’ll be even better...we already have a few folks interested, so if you’re keen to join, please drop us a line for the details as we suspect the next one might be a sell out!

And while wine is definitely our thing we also have a couple of yoga and Tai Chi retreats coming up later in the year...and a wedding as well...off grid? Absolutely...and entertaining!

And as spring marches ever towards summer and the weeds increase my land-cleaning workload by the day (yes, I am definitely starting the strimming this week!), the wine retreat was just one highlight of early May.

We had a big 50^th birthday party celebration featuring some of our favourite friends from Bangkok days – a fabulous festa of pig spitting, oyster shucking, Portuguese champagne popping and silent disco dancing.

We are so grateful that our pal Isabell Poppelbaum picked our piece of Portugal to celebrate her birthday – and it was amazing to spend time with her and all the old friends she brought along for the weekend.

We hiked the coastline to build up an appetite for a lavish lunch at O Sacas – our favourite restaurant in the region – and had loads of extra help from our friends here in the area so we could join in the celebrations as well as keeping the guests fed and watered.

And this weekend we welcomed the winners of the Sovereign Art Prize Gala silent auction to stay with us here in sunny Odemira for a crash course in coastal Alentejo.

With thanks to the legendary Howard Bilton for inviting us to donate a prize, we were delighted to hear stories from Hong Kong and from around the world from the winners.

Canadians David and Liz even brought their lovely friends Carey and Kimberley along for a weekend of winetasting, walking and exploring...and we hope they’ll be back soon and spreading the word among their friends in Lisbon and beyond.

It’s only mid-May, but we’re delighted how things have got off to such a busy start.

July and August are always crazy here, but with 30C predicted for the week ahead, now is a great time to come and see us.

The flowers are in full bloom, our young vines are starting to get themselves properly established, and everything is blooming thanks to all the sunshine and all the winter rain.

Come and see us – we’ll offering a special discount for all our readers from now until the end of June.

Just book on our website and enter the code JOYOFJUNE to get 15% off.

• And don’t forget to vote for us and help us win an award. Here’s a video to show you how…

It’s living proof that ridiculous ideas which might just work, can actually work.

Continuing the theme of doing something which creates far more work than we actually have time to spend...and so utterly outside our comfort zone that it shouldn’t really be possible...we have planted a vineyard.

Just a small one...but if you’ve ever planted 1,000 grape vines by hand you’ll know it’s not that small.

And we’ve been doing it all against the clock.

The only remaining memory of the wet winter is the lush greenery taking over the valley and the flowers now springing into life.

The beautiful white and yellow esteva rock rose blooms are bursting out across the hillsides of Alentejo as the race is on to get the good plants in and the bad plants out before everything gets a lot...harder.

Summer arrived this week with temperatures in the mid 20Cs, and working outside in the middle of the day started getting uncomfortable again.

The weeds which used to easily just lift up out of the gravel paths are now set in stone as the soaked clay soil is turning into concrete and muddy cars become dusty cars.

At least the vines are in – and a few trees and shrubs alongside them. Hopefully a few more of the plants and bushes we’ve been buying will be in the ground over the next few days...when the attention will turn to cutting back brush to abide by fire prevention laws.

Planting a vineyard – it turns out – requires a lot of planning and persuading people with machines to get a series of things happening on time and in order.

In the background was always the question of could we afford the time and money of another project, versus could we afford not to convert the dusty big space behind the houses into something beautiful...the first thing people see as they arrive at the Valley of the Stars.

We always planned to plant a vineyard of Portuguese grapes – not because we know what we’re doing, but because we like to learn and tell the story.

I’d had high hopes for a field blend – a traditional Portuguese insurance policy mix of many different grapes all harvested together when most are ripe and ready and only a few are either green or raisins.

But over the last couple of years continuing our wine journey through Alentejo we’ve been seeking advice from all sides...and after deciding this would be the year to plant, the stalking of anyone who would still pick up the phone has only intensified.

We’ve been worrying winemakers in the way stray dogs worry sheep.

But that’s not all: we’ve been annoying oenologists, vexing viticulturists, aggravating agriculturalists, irritating irrigation experts and getting on grape growers nerves.

We’ve stretched “friendly advice” to its limits.

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We’ve asked everyone what we should do – at least twice – and have been sending a barrage of texts and videos: “Is this how we should water the plants?” I whined.

“Is it too much water? Is it not enough? Did they go in early enough? Did they go in too late? Will they sprout? They’re not sprouting. Are they dead? Maybe they’re still sleeping.”

And that’s just been the last week of worries for a would-be winemaker.

It all started much earlier with a few friends and friends of friends in the know and in the business dropping by to advise us how to grow the best grapes and make the best wine from our cleared eucalyptus forest.

The patch of fast-growing, soil-poisoning, water-hungry monocrop on our land wasn’t well maintained and so one of the first things we did was cut the whole thing forest to make way for the new houses.

Once Lionel the chainsaw man had flattened the forest for free and sliced the wood up into half meter lengths to sell to bakers, we brought in a bulldozer to dig out the roots...and then another one to cut a trench around the perimeter and bury them.

We pondered the standing water in winters, tested the soil, checked the profile and realised we had about 40cm of nutrient-starved soil atop a thick layer of solid clay.

It was such a hard layer that the pine trees which had managed to find enough light to compete with the eucalyptus had roots growing sideways rather than down – which is why they toppled over in the winter winds.

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It was established early on that we would have to break that clay crust to give the grapes a good chance to grow down and tap into the water which would be retained through the heat of summer in the clay.

Planting a vineyard isn’t rocket science – it’s farming. Sadly, I’m neither a rocket scientist or a farmer.

“Winemaking starts in the field” we were told: in our case a large flat one of about half a hectare.

It’s always been my job – and my approach to this crazy new life – to gather information from all possible sides and then either write up the story or implement the findings.

But sometimes gathering too much information from too many people can hamper decision making by flooding the zone, to quote a phrase.

At the end of it all we had to make the big decisions: which varieties, how far apart, how would they be guided to grow, how would they be irrigated?

The winemaking stuff, we have been assured, isn’t something to worry about for at least a few years.

We are hugely grateful to everyone who has advised us – and apologise here and now to Hamilton Reis, Mauro Azóia, Miguel Mimoso, Ana-Rita Bouça, Niels Ulmers, Carsten Jensen, Dorina and Luisa Lindemann...and the many others involved in the making of this movie...for either not doing what they said, or not doing it well enough.

And in my defence, everyone I asked had a slightly different idea of what we should do.

We leaned heavily on Hamilton – the famous Mouchão winemaker with his own wonderful Natus Vini winery – who planted not just his own vineyard recently, but also many hectares of the grapes growing in our vicinity over the past 20 years.

And on speed-dial was patient Mauro – of Porta 6 fame, but also a wonderful small-production winemaker at Velvet Boutique and Artisan’s Terroir who creates our own-label wine (while we wait for our new guys to get producing).

The first big decision was the grape varieties, whittled down to just three: Castelão for the red and Arinto and Alvarinho in the white.

The field isn’t square and amid a confusion of measurements and drone photographs I left the geometry to ChatGPT which advised 800 grapes would be sufficient.

Once we ploughed and were prepping to plant, by putting in wooden posts and stretching long lengths of wire marked with tape every 1.5m (the distance between each plant), we realised it was nearer 1,000 and so upped our Castelão order to 600, settling on 200 for each of the two whites.

The delivery of one thousand grape vines was much more straightforward than I expected.

It was a lot easier than receiving the 25 tonnes of compost in a 16m truck, finding a bulldozer with a big enough “ripper” to cut deep through the clay, and much easier than planting 1,000 vines.

Like many of the busy delivery people who buzz up and down this coast the woman delivering Plansel’s plants wanted to meet at the local petrol station rather than venturing into our valley.

You can listen to the story of how our grape vines were grafted in the third episode of our podcast series Ana & Al’s Big Portuguese Wine Adventure, in all the usual podcast places or here:

The Big Portuguese Wine Adventure

Episode 3: Hard Graft

This episode we discover how a shipwrecked German wine heir accidentally changed Portuguese wines from the roots up, and why his daughter Dorina Lindemann began her winemaking journey with a fizz…

Listen now

2 years ago · 3 likes · 1 comment · Alastair Leithead

I’ll be going into a lot more detail about creating our vineyard on The Big Portuguese Wine Adventure blog, so do sign up if you’re interested.

I didn’t even need to hitch up the trailer – they came tightly packed and chilled in five small boxes.

Of course that was the last part of the puzzle. First of all our local cow king farmer António “O Rei das Vacas” Oliveira, and his fabulously helpful son Gonçalo had to plough, distribute the organic material and plough again...all amid a much-changing weather forecast.

Once the ripper did it’s work cutting through the clay in a day it was over to us, to Krishna and José, and with friends and guests Andrew Major and Howard Fenwick, Joanna Hutchins and Paul McGibney.

It all took a lot longer than we expected.

The grapes languished in bathtubs with their roots under water until we were ready for each bundle of them and five days after arriving all the plants were in.

Rather than providing the vines with the usual wire trellis, we favoured “Bushvine” as they call it in South Africa – each plant clinging to its own bamboo stick and growing individually into a little bush.

Local irrigation expert and general good-egg Cristiano taught us how best to run the water pipes and gave me a shopping list which he and his brother turned into a working irrigation system in a couple of hours.

Automation will come soon, but for now the grapes have been given a good soaking – forcing the air bubbles away from the roots which everyone tells us is important.

Now we wait. We hold our nerve and don’t give them too much water so they learn to grow deep roots down through the clay. Let’s hope the plants wake up soon and like their new home.

• If you want to escape into the country, get away from it all and check out our new vineyard, next weekend is a great time to visit Odemira – the April 25^th celebrations commemorating Portugal’s 1974 Carnation Revolution are a thing to behold. Come and see us!

• And it’s your last chance to sign up for the Wine Retreat which we’re running with the Hutchins Wine Academy Thursday 7th May - Monday 11th May. We have just two places left.

Personally, January wasn’t terribly dry (because of my birthday...and the weather) and I somehow missed the start of Lent altogether...presumably due to that food and wine binge in Cape Town I told you about last time.

But my annual weight-loss programme doesn’t usually get underway until around this time of year anyway.

The need to shed pounds was the biggest take-away from my annual medical MOT this week – at least the blood pressure, blood sugar and cholesterol levels are in strangely reasonable shape.

But it’s a good incentive to get the legs moving with a daily walking routine – all good preparation for the Big Countryside Strim-Off.

For new readers...and loads of you have been arriving recently (thanks for following our journey), there’s a legal fire-prevention requirement in Portugal to cut back all the vegetation within 50m of every building.

It was tough with two buildings, it got even harder with five, and after such a wet winter it’s going to be a busy one this year.

The undergrowth is exploding thanks to all the water in the soil and the power in the sun, so I am currently watching in trepidation as my workload grows by the day.

It’s always that balance of leaving enough time to do the work before an usually moving deadline, but not cutting too early...a bit of April rain can bring a second spurt of growth which then needs another round of grass-cutting and a doubling of the workload.

Speaking of spurts, one of our agaves has already got a head start on us...and all its chums.

The oldest of the plants are maybe 20 years old now and reaching the end of their lives – their last act is to use up every bit of remaining energy and fire a flower many metres into the air.

They grow incredibly quickly – this one has done its first metre in under a week.

Every year we kick ourselves because the plan is to intervene just before the flower starts to grow, cut out the sugar-filled core of the plant, smoke it, ferment it and distil it into mescal. Every year the buggers beat us to it.

There’s already a lot of energy being expended here in the valley – I’m amid a DIY frenzy of getting everything ready in preparation for this year’s high season.

I’ve been doing what they always tell you not to do and playing with electricity – as well as plasterboard, plumbing and paint.

The weeds have been exploding through the gravel and we’ve been trying to pull them up while the currently malleable clay soil turns into concrete.

The transformation takes just a week of warmth – which we’re now enjoying – and so we’ll be turning to strong vinegar and that electric high temperature zapper thingy I bought last year to keep control of our paths and walkways.

Krishna is working like a demon as ever – painting, cleaning, weeding and planting.

Pumps and pressure switches have been coaxed back into life or repaired (thanks Cristiano), a few solar panels which flipped over in high winds are back in business and after being some winter neglect, the salt-water swimming pool is back to its gleaming best.

And it’s not just getting out the unwanted plants of course – Spring is also about getting all the new ones in!

A bag of old potatoes hastily planted in our raised beds has already become a jungle of greenery trying to crowd out the garlic, spinach, spring onions and parsley which are all doing fabulously.

We’ll be popping into the plant nursery this week with the trailer to plan some new additions to our landscape, but the big news this year is the vineyard.

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The Post-It note wall may be full of many, many projects...so many that their very presence strikes fear...but we’ve decided to become viticulturists as well.

The 800 plants have been ordered, and despite all the time spent on reading, research and asking advice from so many wonderful people, it’s all happening now extremely quickly.

The half hectare we’ve set aside for the vines was first cleared by Gonçalo Oliveira – the Cow King’s Son (does that make him O Príncipe de Vacas?) - before Christmas and before all the rain came along.

We delayed ploughing in the organic material needed to boost around 40cm of acidic topsoil exhausted after decades under eucalyptus, and we’re glad we did – the heavy rain would have leached out many of the nutrients.

Everything below that thin layer of soil is clay with a crust so tough the pine tree roots spread sideways rather than down...making them teeter in the wind.

It’s a juggling act of doing everything in the right order so the young vines can be planted the day they are delivered, and it’s even more complicated because the soil is still wet.

We have a narrowing window to arrange the delivery of 25 tonnes of organic material, a tonne of phosphates and whatever lime we can find to reduce the acidity, which all needs to be moved into place and ploughed into the soil.

Then we have to decide where the plants are going, arrange for a “ripper” to visit - a bulldozer with a big metal spike mounted on the front to rip lines through the clay crust down to about 1.2m to give root growth a head start.

Only then can we place the irrigation lines and plant the Portuguese wine grapes we have chosen: 400 Castelão reds , 200 Arinto and 200 Alvarinho in the whites.

The clock is clearly ticking – the table grapes which grow near our house are already bud-bursting, and we need to get the vines in before summer properly arrives.

The wet winter delayed building and landscaping work across the whole region for everybody, and so there’s a sudden rush of demand to dig and clear and plough and rip, so it’s a challenge...let’s hope we can keep the juggling balls spinning and the plates in the air.

With a long to-do list we’re delighted to have a new arrival – Jose Perez has joined us for six months as part of the Erasmus European exchange programme for Young Entrepreneurs.

Jose is from Gran Canaria where his young business is to set up an off the grid tourism lodge 1,700m up on the edge of a dormant volcano crater.

The programme is about the age of the business rather than to entrepreneur, which thankfully means he’s got a lot of experience in sales and in handywork.

I’d obviously heard of the Erasmus programme supporting students for European exchanges, but wasn’t aware of the entrepreneurs scheme until it was introduced to me by the head of the British Portuguese Chamber of Commerce, Chris Barton.

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I’m going to do a deep dive into the scheme for a magazine article which I’ll share here, but suffice to say the EU is funding Jose’s six months with us and we are hugely appreciative of his help.

He’s been diving into the DIY and it’s great having someone with a business mind and fresh eyes moving into the valley.

In exchange, Jose will learn about all our off-grid systems and how a new business navigates a scary new world.

Jose has English to level A2. I passed my A2 in Portuguese a couple of years ago and have just passed my B1 this month...but his English is soooooo much better than my Portuguese. More speaking practice required, I think, as I embark on the next level B2.

It’s unbelievable that Easter is already just around the corner – we have a fantastic weekend planned with sommelier Joanna Hutchins so why not come and join us?

Our Easter Sunday food and wine pairing lunch is a dress rehearsal for the wine retreat in May (we still have two places left...and another retreat in early October if you’re interested!).

And if cancelled flights have messed with your holiday plans come and stay with us for a few nights.

Book online here or get in touch – the 15% Readers’ Discount still applies. Just add the code SPRING26 on checkout. See you soon!

So it was great to swap the “conveyor belt of storms” for a real-life airport conveyor belt as we closed our doors for a couple of weeks and headed south for some southern summer and two glorious weeks in Cape Town.

We’ve now returned from the sunshine, a deep dive into South Africa’s wine industry, and the celebration of our daughter Oda’s 30^th birthday, feeling like we’d had the first proper break since our crazy Alentejo adventure began.

The long list of named storms that hit Portugal was a distant memory in the South African summer, and we thankfully brought the sun back with us.

Even my lost bag made its way home less than 24 hours after missing its transfer in Milan with wine and biltong all present and correct.

There’s something deeply relaxing and inspiring about the city perched at the end of Africa. We love Cape Town.

It was my first posting as a foreign correspondent in 2001 and it’s held a special place in my heart ever since.

I was immediately blown away by its beauty, it’s wild oceans and mountains and its stunning winelands where I first got a proper taste for vinho at a remarkably good exchange rate.

A few years later it was my escape from the chaos of covering the war in Afghanistan; Ana and I made a few trips to the “Mother City” when we lived in Nairobi; and Oda also fell for its beauty, it’s fabulous affordable food and its small city life.

It was her boyfriend Derek’s first trip to South Africa and he threw himself into an adventure which included jamming on a township electric guitar fashioned from an oil can, leading a packed field in a karaoke bar and climbing up Table Mountain with me (boy, I’m out of shape).

Despite being on a budget we ate and drank extremely well, went to wonderful wineries and rediscovered the city, the beaches and the dramatic coastline.

Oda’s birthday lunch was at an amazing place called Salsify at the historic Roundhouse building above Camps Bay and with a view of the “12 Apostles” – the mountains which line up one after another south of Table Mountain.

The wine pairing menu was a wonderful blend of tastes flavours with small-production and old vine wines...I’m salivating just thinking about it.

It was great to hear more Portuguese grapes are growing in South Africa and even amphora wines are being introduced, but the comparison of the two countries and the direction their wine industries are taking is another story in itself I promise to share.

We stayed a couple of nights in Franschhoek, dined at Reuben’s, and I was able to catch up with the indefatigable former BBC cameraman Richard Atkinson whose house building project with the best view of the valley inspired us eight years ago.

We missed university pal Nick Spotswood by a couple of hours as he headed to the UK, but his folks Bill and Judith gave us a warm welcome at the family wine farm in Stellenbosch. The view of the mountains from their stoop only gets better, their wine is delicious and the welcome as warm as ever.

Luke and Lauren Hirst treated us to a proper braai and we opened some of our wines they’ve been looking after for eight years. The whites had sadly passed their best, but the reds more than made up for our sense of loss.

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We had a close encounter with a couple of the African Penguins formerly known as Jackasses (after their call), we hung out with some seals at the Waterfront, wandered Saturday and Sunday markets and enjoyed South Africa’s version of the Time Out Market which Lisbon is famous for.

It was a great reminder of the similarities between my three favourite places: Cape Town, Portugal’s Alentejo litoral and the Central Coast of California.

All have an almost identical latitude, similar climate and vegetation, beautiful light, stunning mountains, wild oceans and great wine. That’s the boxes, and they’re all ticked.

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While we were living it large our animals were under the excellent care of two fabulous couples.

Our friends Rob and Emily who live in Lisbon took the first two week shift to watch over our house, our cats and our dogs...including the now 100 year old Simon who dabbled with incontinence and old-guy confusion before his new liver and thyroid medication properly kicked in.

Alan and Margery Gledson kindly took the final stretch and helped us with some Spring cleaning and some building work before and after we returned to the valley.

Thanks so much to you guys for giving us the chance for a welcome break which revitalised us as we prepare for our next full season.

This week marks the one year anniversary of our tourism licence and our opening up for business, and we’re already delighted at the number of people – and retreat organisers –supporting us for 2026.

While we were away a few more people signed up for our first Wine Retreat in May with the Hutchins Wine Academy.

There are still a few spaces left, but it’s proved so popular we’ve already set the date for our second “Taste like a Somm” residential course: October 1^st to 5^th...so if you were one of those people who couldn’t make May please get in touch.

In preparation for one of the retreat highlights – the “What grows Together Goes Together” pairing dinner – Joanna Hutchins (DipWSET) will be in the valley at Easter to pair up with Ana to create an Easter Sunday spectacular.

We’ve built a whole weekend around it, including three nights B&B, a Good Friday fish braai and an Alentejo wine story-tasting.

If you’d like to take the chance to join the party, just drop me a line or go to our website, pick your room for either Thursday-Sunday or Friday-Monday, and choose the “Escape for Easter” plan. It starts from €456pp (based on two sharing).

Joanna’s still bouncing between Alentejo and Nuuk in Greenland but has recently launched a great Substack page on wine and we hope to hear more about her Portuguese wine adventures.

We eased ourself back into work by hanging out with the Gledsons and it gave us a great reminder of all the interesting people you stumble across in our weird little part of Portugal.

We met Nils and Erling together at the Crabstaurant (A Chaminé in Brejão) and got talking...

Nils Lou is a former pilot who has a small quinta on the edge of our nearest village of São Teotónio and spends his time between here, native Denmark, and the front line of the Ukrainian war.

He has more than 70 years of stories all delivered in a quiet and calm 1950s-style English accent picked up during a stint with the Royal Air Force (RAF) in the UK.

He flew all sorts of jet and propellor aircraft, including the first civilian United Nations flight into Kuwait during the first Gulf War, has tales of daring-do in all sorts of odd and extraordinary places, and it turns out he and his visiting pal Erling have a new hobby.

They drive donated trucks from Denmark to Ukraine to help with the war effort – delivering them where they’re most in need and then finding their own way back. Keep your heads down fellas.

I’m going to post another update in a week or so about another character we’ve come across in our neighborhood – I’ve mentioned the international wood architect Prof Alex de Rijke before and I’d love to share a BBC radio programme and magazine article on Portugal’s Wooden House revolution which I produced with his help...but space is too short today.

Everything looks brighter after a break and in the glorious sunshine and warmth of Spring.

The colourful pointillism painting our landscape becomes at this time every year is slowly starting to take shape, with the first yellows, the white seas of daisies and the tiny blues already bursting out.

The energy from the sun and the water in the soil is boosting everything – the olive trees, the succulents...and of course all the weeds. The Spring strimming workout is going to be epic this year.

And the real welcome home (apart from the animals) has been all the interest in our place for the summer and the autumn – planning is well underway for our first wedding in June and more yoga and tai chi retreats are blocking dates later in the year.

There’s no better time to come and visit – Easter will be fun and it’s such a special time of year here in the valley.

And as a thank you for following our journey please book with the code SPRING26 for a 15% reader’s discount for the rest of March and April (not including the Easter weekend).

Right...got to go...wish me luck...my final B1 Portuguese exam is tonight and I really need to cram it this afternoon! Até proxima as they say around here, or see you next time.

After being battered by Ingrid, Joseph, Kristin...oh Kristin...and Leonardo, the sixth named storm of the year has done what only storm systems can do...and is “barrelling” into Portugal.

There are certain words and phrases it’s hard to separate from their familiar context.

Is anything else dour (pron: DOO-er) except a Scotsman? Only perhaps the weather in Scotland...which is remarkably similar to the last five weeks in Portugal.

It’s just a lot warmer here and being up on a hill removes the threat of flooding.

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As I write, the wind is whipping up a hoolie (that’s the Scottish gale, not the Irish party), all the animals have elected to stay inside, the fire is on and we are sitting in the warm watching the weather apps, monitoring our solar battery levels and hoping nothing too important blows away.

Of course, on the news, storms barrelling into the coast often cause “devastation” and in some cases “utter devastation.”

It might be a trope or journalese, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t true.

The Portuguese government described this as “devastating crisis” caused by the wave of storms – the state of emergency here has been extended and there’s talk of generational flooding...all with a presidential election taking place on Sunday.

Tens of thousands of people were still without power a week after a bomb cyclone and sting jet hit Leiria which is mid-way between Lisbon and Porto quite a way north of us.

More about those two phenomena later – and about their connection to Britain’s Great October Storm in 1987, Krakatoa, bombing raids to Japan during the Second World War, and the two policemen responsible for sending us British weather.

I have organised my life very carefully around avoiding British weather for the best part of 25 years, so you can imagine my current disappointment, even if I haven’t yet needed to change out of my shorts.

But we’ve been lucky here in the valley – the worst so far was the departure of a large section of protective glass from its moorings next to the pool, which somehow didn’t break in the fall.

A few sections of plastic roof have been relocated and retrieved from the forest, the solar panels deep in the valley have flipped over onto the pillow tank, which have so far avoided puncture despite Daniel’s metal pumphouse roof sprouting wings and taking flight.

One gigantic eucalyptus tree has been uprooted and is being desperately supported by one of its neighbouring trees, slowing its journey to the forest floor...we’re already eying that one up to make a bench.

Check out journalist Jorge Branco’s latest Substack update on the storms:

Portugal Weekly

STORM UPDATE: Disaster worsens // Storm Marta on the way // Death toll hits 13 // Flood warnings // How to help

NOTE: This is a special update so you can be across the latest from the storms heading into the weekend. Check the National Authority for Emergency and Civil Protection, weather bureau and government news feed for updates in English. Portugal Weekly will return on Monday morning with the election results and latest on the storms, including more analysis…

Read more

7 months ago · 18 likes · Jorge Branco

Many of the tall dead eucalyptus trees on our neighbour’s land that were sheltering in place amid the new growth following the fire a few years ago have taken a tumble making the wood look more like a giant game of Pick Up Sticks.

Our track is a little cut up but has been worse as main roads have been blocked by falling trees and firefighting bombeiroshave been busy with their chainsaws.

At least 13 people have been killed across the country.

And while some communities are still without water, others have far too much.

The incessant conveyor belt of extra-tropical storm systems being guided straight into the Iberian coast since the start of the year has soaked the soil, filled up the reservoirs and sent storm surges flowing up the rivers...to meet the runoff coming down.

The consequences continue to be dramatic.

Riverside shops and homes in Alcácer do Sal were flooded up to the first floor as the Sado River level went up two metres in 20 minutes.

Memories of covering hurricanes, typhoons, cyclones and tornadoes as a foreign correspondent have come rushing back this week.

The chaos in the French Quarter as Katrina hit New Orleans; the entire bowling alley flattened by a twister in Oklahoma (but with the pins in one lane somehow still standing); Manila under water; and then riskily escaping Madagascar’s east coast by helicopter just ahead of a massive storm.

But with the hatches firmly battened down – and lunch plans quite literally rain checked by a downpour that will undoubtedly trap our neighbours on their land until the flash flood has risen and abated – I’ve had time ponder wordplay and meteorology and to have a deep dive into why we’re getting such a hammering this year.

My geography degree and years of watching weather patterns in our new off-grid home, to understand when to expect trouble, were augmented with a couple of long and slightly confusing conversations with two Portuguese professors.

But I think I’ve worked it out, and with advance apologies to the meteorological purists, I’m going to have a go at explaining it...on the basis that any accuracy lost in the act of simplification is all my own fault.

It’s the Jet Stream.

There we go.

You need more? Ok...

There are a number of jet streams, but the one affecting us is a fast-flowing river of air flowing west to east at around 30,000 feet (9,000m) across the Atlantic.

It’s what planes fly into when going from the US to the UK to save fuel and time...and what they try to avoid on the way back.

It’s created as heat from the equator flows towards the poles and is pulled east by the earth’s rotation. It speeds up where the warm air meets cold polar air.

Like a river it can run fast and straight at 250mph or 400km/h, or meander more slowly making weather systems linger longer…and it can also move further north or further south.

This year it’s further south, broadly bringing icy temperatures to northern Europe, the split of weather we see across North America and more storms to Iberia.

The Baltic’s been, well, Baltic. The minus 34.3C in Lithuania is the lowest since 1996 and Tunisia’s had its heaviest rain in 70 years.

See the Jet Stream forecast here

There’s so much more I want to tell you about the Jet Stream...about how it was noticed after the 1883 Krakatoa volcanic eruption created an “equatorial smoke stream”; about how it slowed American bombing raids to Japan in World War Two, but at the same time sped Japanese explosive-laden hydrogen-filled paper balloons towards the US.

(Fo-Go Balloon bombs were the first intercontinental weapons system and there’s a great episode of the wonderful Radiolab podcast all about it).

Some blue-sky, moon shot thinkers believe it could even be a source of sustainable power generation (presumably once they work out how to keep an aerostatic wing at 30,000 feet...and get the electricity back down to earth).

But there’s more to discuss.

The jet stream guides mid-Atlantic storms and affects where the “two policemen” direct traffic to quote Prof Carlos DaCamara from the University of Lisbon.

The conveyor belt of storms are delivered between the clockwise turning Azores High (in the south) and the anticlockwise spinning Icelandic Low in the north...their position and strength also contributes to pushing six named storms into Portugal this year like on a conveyor belt.

Warmer ocean temperatures and a ready source of water vapour arriving on an atmospheric river from the Caribbean...and we here in Portugal have a lot of wind and a lot of rain.

Many British readers will remember the Great October Storm of 1987 which killed 18 people, felled 15m trees with gusts of 115mph...and came the night after BBC weather forecaster Michael Fish joked there wasn’t a hurricane coming.

He was right – in a way – it wasn’t caused by a hurricane, but by the same phenomenon that caused all the damage in Leiria, according to Prof Pedro Miranda, also of the University of Lisbon.

He explained it was years later in 2004 when Prof Keith Browning and colleagues at the University of Reading identified an intense localised wind descending from a great height where you wouldn’t normally expect it in a storm system. They dubbed it a “sting jet” after a noticeable pattern on satellite maps resembled a scorpion’s tail.

They happen in “bomb cyclones” – depressions which form quickly and deepen rapidly to produce higher winds and stormier weather.

The discovery helped forecasters alert people in Scotland in 2011 and 2012 and it was predicted in Portugal last week...only a bit further north than anticipated.

That’s a lot to take it...and if you’ve made it this far, congratulations.

There’s so much more to say, but this is neither the right time or place...I need to head up the hill soon to see what these crazy winds have done.

With the rain still falling and full reservoirs starting to release water into the rivers, there’s more flooding and chaos to come in Portugal no doubt, but a break in the conveyor belt of named storms is predicted.

Somehow, between squalls, our solar panels bring in plenty of power to keep our batteries well and truly topped up.

But it’s time to bring on some more sunshine, a little less wind and a less cloudy dramatic view of our valleys and the mountains beyond. Our tanks and our lakes are full...it’s now time for a break in the weather.

To learn more about how to visit Alastair & Ana’s eco-luxe lodge Valley of the Stars or Vale das Estrelas, visit the website where you can check availability and book your stay. They’re also running their first Wine Retreat in May with the Hutchins Wine Academy. It’s already filling up, but there are still some places available.

The inundation of daily briefings, updates and newsletters which arrive from the various trusted outlets from different sides of the widening political divide are a deluge to duck below, wait out and then resurface in calmer waters.

Of course, the next swell is already building...it won’t be long before another crest crashes over.

Take your eye off it and you’ll be washing-machined in a tumbling turmoil through the surf and delivered prostrate on the beach.

The game is trying not to get washed up by this relentless surge of warmongering, right-wing rhetoric and utter indecency (mostly coming from America)...and the distasteful giving of tributes to pander to a deeply flawed king.

(Really, María Corina Machado? You really think he’ll give you Venezuela now he’s styled himself as acting president).

BUT...occasionally something pops up which makes riding the swell worthwhile.

This week it was a nicely written piece in The Economist about how the business of wine reflects changes in society.

It’s about isolation, loneliness...and the lubricating antidote which oils the wheels of social interaction.

It struck a real chord because it falls in line with what we’re trying to do here: bringing interesting people together with a glass of wine, sharing a meal and a story.

It reflects what we love about wine, and how it helps put storytelling at the heart of our off-grid lodge.

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Hopefully this link will take you to the full article, but if not, you’ll get the gist as I’ve decided to pull out some quotes, tease out a few thoughts and pick it all apart.

Of course, I could have chosen mixed martial arts for my news metaphor, which for some reason I’m inundated with every time I dip into some passive doom scrolling, alongside an inundation of rugby tries, woodworking demonstrations, DIY tips and Australian dad jokes.

I guess it could be a lot worse.

Algorithms have become our personalised shadows following us around the metaverse like the daemons of the Philip Pulman fantasy novels and TV show His Dark Materials.

But nevertheless I am slightly fascinated by the surprise flying kicks, back-handed punches and sneaky use of elbows-to-the-head in the MMA clips...yet another good allegory for world politics.

Talking of inundations, we’ve been having an amazing amount of rain – the 200,000 litre rainwater tank is full to almost overflowing, the lake’s outflow stream is back and we now know exactly where to put the drainage channels in the new vineyard.

Although I’m still not wearing a jumper (I am from Newcastle don’t forget), the chillier temperatures mean we can put on a lovely fire, reach for a warming Alentejo red and (with thanks to the anonymous Economist author of “Falling wine sales reflect a lonelier and more atomised world”) let the story begin...

“The long, dark days can lower people’s moods”

On the one hand it’s a great idea giving up booze for January, but on the other it’s a terrible time to deny yourself something nice to warm up the longer nights...especially when the act of drinking takes you to a nice cosy bar.

But straight off the back of the festive season with bulging belt buckles it seems like the right thing to do (“the exhortations of do-gooders to forgo...” as the writer elegantly puts it!)

Ana and I have cut back this month...but more in the realisation that running a tourism lodge around wine and joining in with every guest is going to kill us pretty quickly.

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I’ve never suffered from the SAD (seasonal affective disorder) short days depression, but that’s mostly because I’ve organised my life around living in places where it’s still warm and sunny most of the time.

SADly alcohol sales are on the wane through a combination of a GenZers drinking a lot less (presumably as a form of revolution against the grown-ups who set such a bad example during their childhood) and the various studies citing the health detriments of booze, but the Economist interviewees say there’s more to it than that.

“Wine’s decline reflects something deeper: a fraying of the social fabric that once held Western societies together.”

That’s what Andrés Pérez thinks.

His family runs the Alyan vineyard in Chile (which looks amazing by the way) where “Wine tasting...is more a carefully curated social event than a lesson in tannins.”

I said exactly the same thing presenting this week’s wine story-tasting for 43 people...well, perhaps not quite as eloquently or directly, but it’s what I meant... it’s less about fancy language and more about enjoying what you like.

Yes, you read it correctly, wine tasting...for 43...that was a first!

We had a fantastic group staying on their corporate retreat, or ‘off-site’ as we’ve learned is the new word for it.

In collaboration with nearby yoga centre Orada (and with huge thanks to David for asking us to be involved), we hosted the Verto Eduction management team for the week.

Our solar system once again brilliantly navigated a full house despite the rain as the study abroad programme staff gathered from all over the world and cosied up in the Clubhouse to hear a little Portuguese history through wine.

We treated them to our favourite Vicentino white blend, a Gerações de Talha introduction to Alentejo’s amphora wine world, some Esporão Reserva 2022 and Mouchão’s stunning 2017 Alicante Bouschet.

Alyan apparently “once offered hour-long tasting sessions. Now they last four. By the end of the visit, strangers are swapping numbers and shaking hands.”

While I didn’t bang on about Alentejo wine for four hours the volume of conversation certainly increased as we ticked off the wines.

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“Anthropologists see the decline in communal eating as part of a broader social unravelling.”

We’ve loved hosting a family-style meal around a long table on the terrace when we’ve had the time in this first year of being open.

(Running this place is sometimes a bit like the Trump presidency...it feels like a lot longer, but it still hasn’t been a full year!)

It’s been great to bring people together over a fish braai or some grilled black pork with lashings of Alentejo wine – ideally from a flagon – to get the conversations going.

“People across the rich world increasingly live, and eat, alone. As a result, more people now eat and unwind in front of screens.”

Now that’s an easy one,

We encourage guests to the valley to let their phones have a holiday too: to switch off and take it easy...ideally from the comfort of a locked box (the phones, not the guests).

Phil Davies – friend and BBC cameraman from Nairobi always swore we needed to go on safari at least once every six weeks to give our eye muscles a workout.

After all the close up reading we do in front of screens, he argued, we periodically need to scan a distant horizon to maintain the flexibility to switch to long vision.

It’s also great while on safari with friends to be practiced enough to know the difference between a lion and a rock that looks like a lion at 400m.

Our views are vast, there’s a old windmill on a hill to focus on and we do have a few rocks that look like Iberian lynx...and of course a big library of books and shelves of games for quiet days.

But of course off-grid doesn’t mean always offline as there’s a need to keep in touch.

“Generation Z...drink differently, increasingly seeking out quality and novelty.”

Tick.

Of the 350 different grapes grown in Portugal, 250 are indigenous.

And nothing says wine novelty more than Antão Vaz and Arinto, Trincadeira, Tinta Miúda and the two Touriga’s (Nacional and Franca).

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Quality and novelty are a draw with young drinkers on the basis that the reason the hipster burnt their mouth on coffee was because they wanted to drink it before it was cool (buh-buhm-tshing).

Alentejo is of course home to the original natural wine – talha, or amphora wine made the way the Romans made it...and made that way in a few places ever since.

And it’s perhaps the main reason our lower, or Baixo Alentejo, has been awarded European city of wine for 2026.

“For some people, drinking is an isolating addiction. But for most it is a social indulgence. And that, increasingly, is what people are missing.”

I’ve always loved a bit of social indulging. I have been known to socially overindulge, but only occasionally.

And that’s the inspiration around a few of the things we’re planning for this year. The main one is the Wine Retreat we’re doing with the Hutchins Wine Academy in May...people are signing up for that already and it’ll be a lot of fun…there are still places left, so join us!

Hwa X Vde Wine Retreat May 2026

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Seventy wines, some amazing meals and winery adventures and you leave it tasting wine like a sommelier!

Our Detox/Retox days of exercise then alcohol are perfect for February and March when the shoulder devils and angels both get their way...on the same day.

And that plan to run a regular open house wine tasting every Friday is taking a step closer to becoming a thing.

We might even host something fun on Sunday February 1^st...a sort of goodbye dry and welcome back wet rest-of-the-year...let us know if you’re interested.

The EU is providing “funds to uproot grapevines in order to reduce the bloc’s wine glut.”

Of course they are.

So obviously we’re planting half a hectare while everyone’s getting money for pulling it up.

Speaking of which, I really must get my wellies on, take to the field and start counting up how many plants we need...I don’t trust my geometry (or ChatGPT’s).

As a kid I was the spoilt brat with no brothers or sisters to share the gift space on Santa’s sleigh; and as a grown-up I get to celebrate twice...or some might argue, three times.

Since Ana and I met, Christmas has officially begun on December 24^th with a julbord of pickled herring and smoked salmon, glazed ham, meatballs with red cabbage and potato bake, special seasonal dark bread and crispbread wheels of Vörtbröd alongside cheese...to make sure nobody goes hungry.

It’s all finished off by saffron buns and gingerbread...and washed down with lashings of glögg mulled wine, laced with spices (and vodka). Tack.

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Then to continue the excess, the 25^th kicks in with turkey and all the trimmings, sweet mince pies and a Christmas cake which spent the first few months of its life soaked in brandy.

And, of course, British celebrations come with the bonus of Boxing Day for turkey and all the trimmings (round two) fried up in a bubble & squeak and then a thick soup to make sure we don’t go near a turkey for another year.

Musical Odemira: it was great to see the Lisbon Metropolitan Orchestra play at the opening concert of the Estação das Artes in Santa Clara/Sabóia presented by Miso Music Portugal

This was part of a fantastic medley of Christmas songs (hence the hats!) - great to have such an amazing performance in our region

Where I still love the Christmas specials on British TV and the King’s Speech, Ana loves the decades-long Swedish tradition of watching Kalle Anka och hans vänner önskar God Jul (From All of Us to All of You) - an animated best-of-Disney special which was first shown in 1958 and they’ve been watching it at Christmas in Sweden pretty much every year since.

But with us still knee-deep in learning marketing (as I mentioned last time) and the occasional guests to attend to...and with it being just the two of us for Christmas this year we’ve cut down on the decorations and the inevitable food mountain.

All those Swedish and British specialities are bad enough when shared with a dozen people, let alone just us and the animals...even though the animals might disagree.

Normally we go Christmas-crazy...imagine an explosion in a tinsel and fairy-light factory.

But having lost so many old and treasured glass baubles to the wrong kind of Christmas tree harvested from our own land with their non-stick branches we’ve decided to go tree and tinsel free this year.

The nearest we get to a white Christmas here is fields swathed in daisies after the autumn rain, and although the weather’s not as unseasonally strange as a southern hemisphere December (Joburg also celebrates Xmas in July don’t you know), we’re still enjoying temperatures in the mid-teens Celsius by day, and not much less than 6C by night.

It did feel a little more Christmassy in Lisbon this week.

We had a little end-of-year business to do with our amazing accountant Madalena, talking all things wine with our friend Mauro, and recording a radio story I’m doing on Portugal’s wooden house revolution.

And we were also invited to a fabulous event organised by Stephen O’Regan and his People of Lisbon...at André Pinguel’s secret wine & dinner club Flores.

People Of Lisbon

Lisbon's Secret Clubs, Speed Networking, and a Bit of Madness

Hello People Of Lisbon…

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An amazing gang of interesting people gathered – including magician Magic Douglas and the famous performer Lamb Chop...assisted by ventriloquist Mallory Lewis (daughter of Shari Lewis who created Lamb Chop in the 1950s!).

We visited a few Christmas markets, discovered another of the old-school amazing bars in the Pavilhão Chinês family, and took Simon the dog to all his favourite places including the Jardim da Estrela where he picks up his Lisbon pee-mail.

Garfunkel remains less convinced by the big city.

The only two safe spaces in town for the big dog are our flat in Estrela and “The Big Red Box of Freedom” (Cassie the Hilux) which he knows is the only way back to his monte in Alentejo.

We visited a couple of our favourite old-style Portuguese lunch and dinner places and treated ourselves to a few fun desserts.

And it’s been a good week for Portugal on quite a few end-of-year measures which are usually published this time of year.

Not only did TasteAtlas name Pastéis de Belém the best “sweet pastry” in the world, it also awarded it third place along with all the other pastel de nata makers in Portugal.

I do love a Pastel de Nata – and we certainly consider the ones from Belém in Lisbon the original and the best.

And in the cake category – it was a straight one/two for Ana with both her countries taking top honours.

In second place was the Swedish rich chocolate cake kladdkaka which our daughter Oda has mastered.

First place in the cake charts went to Pão de Ló – a famous creamy egg-yolky sponge cake which I had never heard of...let alone tried...until just this week when our winemaking friend Mauro gave us one for Christmas.

He also handed over another car-load of his own fantastic Castelão red wine and some wax for us to put Vale das Estrelas labels on and seal ready for the year ahead.

We also tried a white wine – an Arinto – which he thinks could be a good one for us to stock...or perhaps a white blend he’s still perfecting...so we can have a Vale das Estrelas red and white wine next year.

The only problem is we need a label...are there any artists we know out there? (I’m thinking of you Ed Sumner and the Cheese & Wine Painting Club!)

And speaking of cheese, TasteAtlas awards Portugal the world’s third best cheese, with its Queijo de Azeitão semi-soft sheep’s cheese from just up our coast in Setúbal.

Portugal also claimed top spot in the Economist’s end of year measure of which economy did best in 2025.

Topping Spain’s performance to take last year’s honour, the magazine praised Portugal’s “strong GDP growth, low inflation and a buoyant stockmarket.”

And there has been some good news in terms of big investment coming to the country, and some great news as far as we’re concerned – with tourism heading for a record €30bn year.

There are two sides to the story of course – although the government announced the minimum wage would be increased by €50 next year, it only takes it to €920 a month.

It goes some way to explain why it might be the best performing economy, but again in the Economist, it’s only in 40^thplace for living standards.

And the European Commission estimated house prices are overvalued in Portugal by more than 25% which is contributing to a lack of affordable housing here.

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All figures which make my story on the rise of the wooden, modular house in Portugal even more relevant...I’ll let you know when it’s out.

But for now...all the very best for the holiday and the year ahead...and don’t forget the reader’s discount code when you book to come and see us (XMAS25 )...and our first wine retreat in partnership with the Hutchins Wine Academy in May.

We hope to see you here in 2026!

Having just about got to grips with off-grid living (first basic, then advanced level), building site project management, landscaping, interior design (Ana, definitely not me), accounting and basic small-hotelier-ing...we’ve reached the next rung on the career ladder.

We built it and they came – in the summer – and now we have to keep them coming back in the quieter seasons too, telling their friends to visit, and drumming up some new business on the basis this is a remarkable place we were very lucky to find.

For now we have to do what we can until Adelin arrives – a Swedish communications undergraduate (and Oda’s cousin) who is doing a work placement with us early next year to take control of our social media and play the algorithms at their own game.

Until then, we are diving into the world of pricing structures, discount deals, combination packages of rooms and meals...and retreats.

We’ve been emailing travel agents, contacting friends of friends who are retreat leaders and working out how to use our website properly...including all the data and marketing information it can provide us.

And, dear reader, we do have a couple of things coming up which might be of interest...primarily an introduction to wine by a sommelier, marketing exec and author – our friend Joanna, whose Hutchins Wine Academy is hosting its first wine immersion course at our place in May.

She has a coveted Wine & Sprit Educational Trust diploma and is a qualified wine educator…we’re going to have a lot of fun with this in May 2026. First come, first served!

Check it out...it’d make a great Christmas present! (see, I’m learning!).

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We're delighted to host the first Hutchins Wine Academy "Taste like a Somm" event in May 2026...classes, dinners, tastings, a winery visit all included.

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I had always considered myself to be quite entrepreneurial while working at the BBC – in selling stories to my editors in the competitive world of limited money and airtime.

I’d often get extremely excited about a particular idea and go all-in to sell it hard – often to different TV and radio programmes and online outlets to scramble together enough cash pledges to afford the trip.

I didn’t always succeed, but did get a big safari series commissioned in Africa and managed to secure a not insubstantial amount of cash for an ambitious six-week trip on the Congo River filming in Virtual Reality and recording binaural sound.

(I still love the fact that in the world of short attention spans and “you’ve got to grab them in the first 5 seconds” our 45min TV doc on the DR Congo on YouTube has more than 20m views!).

Having sold the story, our team then had to deliver it...and that often took even more effort to make things happen with a limited time and budget in difficult places.

As British military officers in Afghanistan often told me: “no plan survives first contact [with the enemy].”

I’ve discovered there are at least a few transferrable skills from journalist to small business co-founder, but dogged determination and bloody-mindedness stand out as perhaps the most useful.

Accounting comes into it too: I would often have to keep up with long lists of expenses in a range of random currencies while on assignment.

Thankfully the amazing producers I worked with were very good at that...as well as all the other things they don’t get the on-air recognition for, such as securing access and interviews, editing, and managing the “flesh puppets”...annoying correspondents like yours truly.

There were times when I had to manage big-ish budgets and I understand why one fellow journalist, on discovering a receipt for $50 was missing, attempted some creative writing while on a flight out of a Middle Eastern war zone.

Sadly, the ploy of copying some random Arabic script for a hastily scribbled receipt was uncovered by an Arabic-reading accountant back at head office who queried the $50 claim for a “Your lifejacket is under your seat.”

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Having just logged one thousand receipts and more than two hundred invoices for 2025 in this latest accounting job, I think I’m doing OK, but the “sell, sell, sell” mantra of marketeers isn’t as straightforward.

For a start there’s the barrage of self-declared influencers looking for a freebie to navigate: “we’d need at least three nights to truly capture the essence of your lodge,” one wrote.

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There are so many travel sites out there who for a reasonable annual fee will feature our property on their website...but we can’t justify signing up to all of them and it’s a bit of a lottery.

We’re happy to be working with Sawday’s and Further Afield, and hope to have more collaborations in fitting with our ethos of sustainability.

I’ve been writing a column for the Resident magazine (formerly known as the Portugal Resident) for a while now and they’ve just started a new podcast.

I was delighted to chat to Carl Munson about our story. With all the disruption going on in the world – not least in the USA – I’ve done a few interviews telling the story of our dramatic decision to change lives before 50, give up our jobs and retrain in lots of new ones…and hopefully that will bring a few extra guests to our door!

The price of promoting things on social media seems to be going up all the time, and we need to learn how to target audiences better, but that all takes time.

We were delighted to be invited to donate a luxury two night package to the Sovereign Art Foundation’s annual Gala auction – and even more excited about being invited along to the event.

We were pleased to see it was a very competitive auction and we’re looking forward to welcoming the winners in May!

As well as working on making posts and programmes, we’re also learning about how to measure what’s going on through data.

I’ve written before about the challenges of managing Booking.com, AirBnB, Expedia and our own direct-booking website...and I’m only now starting to understand how they undercut prices and also pay us a lot less after taking their cut.

I’ve also mentioned the desire to host more “retreats” – package trips for groups based around yoga, or painting, or reading (or wine!), corporate get-togethers that are now known as “off-sites” apparently.

Even Better Offer for our Pioneers:

• If you are one of Our Pioneers and have stayed with us before, we’ll give you and your friends an even better discount

• Book before the end of January

• Valid throughout 2026 as long as the rooms are available!

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The title “retreat” does conjure up the idea of 5am yoga sessions, cleansing shakes and a large amount of wellness.

We’ve joked for years about how rather than detox, RE-tox is perhaps a better fit for us: the Retoxification Institute of Portugal, perhaps, or R-I-P for short.

At our daughter Oda’s suggestion I can officially confirm we are starting a Detox/Retox package for those who like a balanced diet of healthy morning activities, followed by plenty of wine and a fabulous meal to finish: Detox, Retox, Rinse and Repeat. Would you buy one? Do let us know.

We’ve already learned about the seasonal nature of tourism on this coast, and it’s certainly quieter in December.

But apparently it’s not just us: for real data you need to speak to the cheesemaker.

Queijaria do Mira receives real data from real people in real time…and knows when occupancy rates are down...because they know exactly how much cheese the tourist lodges are buying.

Low cheese sales mean low occupancy.

Blessed be the cheesemaker and her buying barometer.

And all of us on the western edge of Europe have had some kind of encounter with Storm Claudia (as Spanish meteorologists named her) over the past week or so.

As any household relying on nothing but solar power will know, there’s only one drawback to having 300 days a year of sunshine in Portugal – and that’s the other 65 or so without.

When we first moved into the Valley of the Stars we very quickly learned which power-hungry luxuries to save for the sunshine.

For example, one never makes toast while blow drying the dog (not that one would necessarily ever want to...I rarely eat toast).

Relying completely on renewable power means learning how to carefully monitor exactly what is being used where, and deciding on contingencies as each cloudy or stormy day arrives.

And as we have increased the number of buildings, guests, pumps and water treatment units, the more power you use and the greater the need for planning and backups.

We sort of fell into the off-grid thing without really thinking about it and looked into the figures for connecting to the Portuguese grid when we were planning our construction.

It turned out the combination of inverters, pylons and cables was going to cost almost the same as a brand spanking new solar set up.

So our decision to go the sustainable route was aided by the idea of having one very large electricity bill at the beginning and free power after that.

Having dodged the late October storm courtesy of a big mountain getting in the way, we were battered by Storm Claudia like everyone else.

Anything coming up towards us here from the south tends to hit the mountains of Monchique and Fóia peak first, leaving us in the rain shadow.

The apps often predict we’ll get many millimetres, but weather from the Algarve usually ends up dropping far less rain on us than the apps predict.

Of course in dry times that works against us, rule one is “never complain about the rain,” however much there is, because we depend upon it to fill our lake and our giant 200,000 litre pillow tank for mixing into drinking water.

Thankfully there were no tornados to report like the one which Claudia brought to the Algarve, but as always, the first big storm of the autumn helps us switch back into ‘winter mode’ of carefully monitoring all our energy consumption...and keeping an eye on the weather.

There’s a lot more at stake than knowing whether or not to take our brolly, or if I should make the move from shorts and sandals to trousers and sensible shoes (I believe that time has now come for this year...but that’s not bad given it’s nearly December).

As far as weather forecasts, most predictions for our valley are at very best only half correct, and so I channel my inner weatherman, hark back to my Geography degree and start muttering about cold fronts and barometric pressure.

Our favourite weather forecasting apps are Weather Underground and Ventusky which provide us with a broad outline, real time radar and some big-picture predictions as the various models plot expected rainfall and front movements by the hour.

Our friend Niels – who has sailed around the world and records climatic data in his vineyard – put us on to Ventusky and also introduced us to Weather Watcher on YouTube, which gives great regular summaries of Europe for the committed weather nerd.

After five years I am starting to learn some patterns, but it’s tough with everything becoming more unpredictable and extreme thanks to global warming.

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Storm Claudia was a tricky one – she hung around a lot longer than the average storm thanks to being sandwiched between two areas of high pressure in the Atlantic and over mainland Europe.

And she also had a nasty habit of bringing rain all day, and then clearing all night – perfect for star gazing but not great for our solar system.

I’m not sure of the science behind it, but we usually get more rain overnight and at least a little sunshine during each day...and thankfully we don’t need much to boost our batteries and regenerate our confidence.

When designing off-grid systems, Solar Iain told us there’s no limit to how much power we can generate and store, it’s just a matter of how much we are prepared to invest.

After estimating how much energy 22 people might use and expecting expansion we built a system that is way bigger than we need for most of the year.

We swan through summers barely looking at the solar read-out, blessed as we are by enough solar panels to happily ensure the batteries are full every day before breakfast is over – despite the pumps, the power use and all the people.

And even when the days get shorter, we have confidence in our 84 solar panels which still bring in power when it’s overcast.

But when a storm hits and the clouds persist, we really earn our keep as an off-grid resort.

That is when power monitoring becomes an obsession.

Our first port of call is the Victron app on our phones which immediately shows us how much power is coming in and how much is being used on each of our three phases.

Battery percentages are notoriously inaccurate, but we’ve found voltage level to be the best measure keeping everything going – once it drops to 48V the power goes off.

The key is staying above 50V – something easily achievable with some tight management and a backup generator.

Going the next level down to monitor individual buildings and pump houses took a fair bit of research, but we went for Emporia Energy from the US.

The sensors clip around cables to measure how much electricity is moving through them.

Sadly, some cost-cutting by our electrician left far too many things crammed into one small box...confusing even him.

He grumpily clipped on the monitors and even managed to wedge the box shut, but at one point the car charger circuit was using the most power, which is confusing as we don’t have a car charger yet.

Having switched the labels around we now get a pretty good idea of what’s going on, even if I need a few more hubs from the US to give us the full picture.

Now I’m ordering some internet-connected switches to save me running up the hill and turning things off manually in the rain.

Despite the days of rain we stayed well out of the danger zone, and as we watched the sun rise and its rays start reaching our panels...despite the forecasts...our overall outlook became even brighter.

The first test is always the toughest as we tweak our pumps and get back into our power-saving routines, but once again our system passed with flying colours.

Speaking of flying colours we’d love to find a decent but affordable wind turbine which can integrate into our Victron solar system...anyone with recommendations, please get in touch!

With the batteries filling up fast, our trip to Vila de Frades and Vidigueira for the talha opening celebration weekend was back on.

Driving into the interior Alentejo the skies cleared in front of us, the storm headed off into Spain and we entered an adega packed full of some of the most exciting wines and interesting winemakers

It was Simon the dog’s 98^th birthday (14 human years x 7) and if I ever make it to his age I’d be more than happy with a day like it: McDonalds lunch, a load of excellent wine, a huge amount of attention and a late night dance party to finish.

We’ve got the power.

And now the storm has passed we’re enjoying crisp cold nights and beautifully clear sunny days with bright blue skies...and yes, I am still wearing the shorts.

The last known tracks the pachyderms left behind are a series of fossilised footprints discovered here on our wild west coast of Alentejo.

Not long after their steps in the sand were frozen in time, the giant, straight-tusked elephants were extinct.

It wasn’t until 218BC that they returned – when Hannibal of Carthage shipped a North African herd to the Iberian peninsula and marched them over the Alps to the edge of Rome.

Now they’re coming back to inland Alentejo, and this week I was lucky enough to have a guided tour around their new home.

“It reminds me very much of Zambia,” Kate Moore told me as we drove onto the 400ha of land which will soon be Europe’s first large-scale elephant sanctuary.

“It’s a really beautiful site. It used to be a cattle farm and a eucalyptus plantation, and we’ve spent the last one or two years basically trying to restore the biodiversity on site to get ready for elephants.”

Kate Moore, who spent years working in conservation in Malawi, is managing director of the UK conservation charity Pangea which has spent years scouring Europe for the right site (and whose video footage I’ve attached above).

“We did a feasibility study looking at all the different landscapes, honed in on the Iberian peninsula mainly because of the habitats, looked at hundreds of properties and finally shortlisted and got down to this one.

“Gentle, rolling hills, lots and lots of water, good diverse habitat, and also privacy,” were the reasons they chose the site which straddles the two municipalities of Vila Viçosa and Alandroal just south of Estremoz.

But this isn’t a safari park, or a large zoo – it will be a sanctuary for elephants to retire after spending their lives in the circus or in zoos around Europe.

“Our first elephant is confirmed as an elephant from Belgium – she’s called Kariba – she was wild-caught in Zimbabwe 40 years ago, she was shipped off to Germany and has spent the last 40 years in zoos in Belgium, the Netherlands and Germany.”

And as most EU states have banned circus elephants, and zoos are planning to give them up voluntarily, they need somewhere to go.

Pangea will have space for 20 to 30 elephants, and they are preparing to receive Kariba early next year.

A large shed for the elephants to take shelter from the summer heat and the chill of winter is almost finished and holes were being dug for the last sections of giant metal tube fencing – think Jurassic Park.

“Basically it’s ready to receive the first elephants,” said Graça Fonseca, a board member at Pangea and a former Portuguese minister of culture.

“First because it’s really a foreign investment that comes to Portugal not for tourism, but for a project that’s about conservation.

“It’s about our connection with the land and the connection between humans and animals and I think that’s why it’s special and will put Portugal on the map.”

It’s certainly got people talking in the local coffee shop.

Graça Fonseca told the story of an early visit when the shop owner asked “are you the people bringing the elephants?” and she was delighted to hear they were, as none of her customers would believe her when she told them the animals were moving in nearby.

The plan is to have open days for schools and the local community, and to create a discovery centre nearby to raise awareness about elephants and their habitat.

“The most important thing...is giving them as much space we can give them in as natural a habitat as possible and all about giving them autonomy and freedom to choice, but it’s really important they get expert care,” Kate Moore told me.

The Mayor of Alandroal, João Grilo, is a teacher and welcomes the educational opportunity it brings, but he also hopes the project will bring new life to a poor rural area.

“I think it’s very important because we are giving an example of conservation and restoration of natural environments,” he said.

“If we find ways that people could live here, build their life projects and still preserve the natural environment and create jobs that’s a great way we can do it.”

The sanctuary is being paid for by large donations from individuals as well as grants from trusts and foundations.

Pangea is also a registered non-profit organisation in Portugal…just saying for those people out there looking to get a golden visa...

One of Pangea’s ambassadors is the famous Portuguese artist Joana Vasconcelos who created a huge colourful woven blanket for the launch of the sanctuary.

There’s been a huge rush of interest from the Portuguese media this week at the thought of elephants silhouetted on an Alentejo landscape, reminiscent of the African savannah but with the characteristic flat-topped acacia trees replaced by cork oaks.

After years spent making films and telling stories about elephants across Africa it’s nice to have a story like this come to my new home.

This one is about poaching arriving in Botswana – and it got me into a lot of trouble with the then-president.

And here’s a piece from back in the day when the BBC was happy to pay money for these types of big impact stories:

This is the TV documentary version.

Each elephant which will retire to Portugal will have a traumatic back story shrouded in crime, corruption and the pursuit of ivory.

I’m looking forward to telling more of their tales as the Pangea sanctuary takes shape.

“They’re going to love it here,” Kate Moore believes.

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Into the Alentejo…

It was a six hour round trip to Vila Viçosa for the journey to the elephant sanctuary, and despite my iPhone going flat and having no charger I was still back in time for Portuguese class at the local school (if a little late).

Alentejo covers a third of Portugal and there’s so much to see inland...from impressive castles, monasteries, vineyards...and soon elephants.

Next weekend we’ll be heading back to Vila de Frades – Friars’ Town – for the annual opening of the talhas, or amphora wines…I’ll let you know how it goes.

Traditional Cante Alentejano singing, local meats & cheeses and wine straight from the clay is the order of St Martin’s Day – November 11^th – when the vinho starts to flow.

I’ve written a couple of pieces in the past about this time of year – this is the history of St Martin and the various autumn traditions across Europe…

And this is the great tale of former diamond miner turned winemaker Teresa Caeiro, of Vila de Frades and the Geraçoẽs de Talha winery where she grew up…and the audio version from our podcast Ana & Al’s Big Portuguese Wine Adventure - you can start listening to episode 1 here or wherever you usually get your podcasts.

And Finally…

It may be November, but we’ve been enjoying a bit of St Martin’s Summer and ocean currents from the south have made the water the warmest it’s been all year.

We’ve been hosting a yoga retreat this weekend and they’ve been treated to some amazing morning mists over the valley. We’re talking to retreat leaders and wedding planners, so if you’re looking for a venue do get in touch.

• Please come and see us - we’ve extended our discount for readers booking a room or apartment to stay in November and early December (with the code BLOG25). Book here.

• AND…we will also be open for a cozy Christmas and New Year when it’s sunny during the day and cold enough at night to justify an open fire! Should be fun.

I last wrote about us suddenly realising it was September with the brief moment we had to reflect on our first summer season as small-hoteliers.

In retrospect I can put an exact date on that lull: Thursday September 11^th – our first night without guests since the rollercoaster ride pushed out of the stalls in July – and the only night we’ve had to ourselves since then!

Presumably, real people who plan, design and build eco-luxe lodges have a pretty clear idea before they start as to who will come and visit.

We hedged our bets by building a few apartments and handful of en-suite rooms, but also a communal Clubhouse space for events and meals.

It was about variety – appealing to different people with different needs – big families spending a week or two together, couples wanting a get-away and ‘retreats’ where some people like to share and others prefer their own space.

And somehow amid the naivety of the “build it and they’ll come” business plan, we’ve continued to have an amazing mixture of fun and fascinating people finding us.

Some spot our little lodge on Google maps, some ask ChatGPT (which for some reason seems to like recommending us) and others see the reviews generous people have been leaving and look us up.

Of course it’s been an easier sell during the guaranteed sunshine of a Portuguese summer, when beaches beckon and the pool is the perfect antidote to some time on a sun-lounger.

Like any double-speed investment ad disclaimer, temperatures here can go up and down; rain does sometimes fall in Portugal (thankfully); and 300 days with sunshine does mean an average of at least 65 days without.

But there aren’t many places left in Europe quite as wild and untouched as our southwestern coast of Alentejo – and not many places like ours in the area.

It’s still the beauty of the landscape, the seascapes, the clifftop coastal paths, the star-scape by night...and the simple silence which are the top attractions.

Whether a glass of rosé with the pink tint of a reflected sunset, a morning run through the mysterious mist and an encounter with a large stag (yes, that happened to our guests this week) or with the dramatic clouds of an impending Atlantic storm, it’s always special.

It’s inspired us to plan for future expansion already and apply for an innovation and sustainability grant, set up to support young and small businesses like ours in our region.

Our architect has designed some additional apartments which can be built elsewhere and lifted into place to avoid us returning to the bad-old building site days.

Here’s the plan:

But until people realise what they’re missing out on and discover what we fell in love with here, they need a reason to come and visit.

And that’s what brings us to the paint and the porn-stars…

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It had been on the calendar for months...a colourful little block of days closed for new bookings labelled “Art Retreat.”

It was our first multiple-day, full-board retreat in the Valley of the Stars, and we had a full house of amateur painters.

The group were mostly from the UK and were members of my old pal Ed Sumner’s Cheese & Wine Painting Club.

We knew a four-day full-on retreat would be tough with all 17 guests needing breakfast, lunch, dinner...and drinks every day.

And with just us and our first employee Krishna, we asked our daughter Oda to fly back from LA, after her heroic six-week stint in the summer had helped us get through the hectic schedule of bookings.

Ed started his painting club in London a few years ago – running events in pubs where he’d teach basic techniques by showing would-be artists how to paint their own master.

Copying a Constable, making a Monet or having a go at a Van Gogh was a great way in for many folk.

But during the pandemic when Ed’s Yorkshire lilt helped hundreds of people keep connected to the outside world...by joining his online painting classes.

Cheese and Wine Painting Club

Portugal got Painted

Big thanks to the team at Vale Das Estrelas - Al, Ana & Oda - for looking after us…

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a year ago · 5 likes · Ed Sumner

Friendships formed over WhatsApp and Zoom and it helped a lot of people through the loneliness of lockdown.

That’s why some of those gathering in Vale das Estrelas had only met fellow club members online, so it was their first chance to meet in person.

There was also a last minute appearance from an American couple Craig and Betty who’d read about the retreat and signed up a couple of weeks before.

Craig writes the Pat the Expat column in the Portugal Resident magazine (where I also do a version of this blog once a month) and thought it might make a fun place to explore while Betty did the painting.

The Cheese & Wine Painting Club crowd enjoyed the food and the wine as much as the painting classes, as they tucked into Ana’s amazing and endless repertoire of local specialities, sampled some of Alentejo’s finest wines and worked their way through Oda’s cocktail menu.

Many hadn’t tried bochechas (pig cheeks) or arroz de pato (duck rice) before.

They loved the flame grilled dourada, their beach picnic, and Ana’s Asian twist on Portuguese bifanas thanks to an amazing chef and super sous chef Oda.

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Oda cut her teeth as a bartender in the fancy rooftop terraces of Los Angeles and

“If we have it, I can make it,” her whiteboard boasted, above a list of suggested cocktails to which someone added “Porn Star Martinis.”

Apparently a core of club members have meet-ups in the UK and Porn Star Martinis have become a tradition.

Not in her usual repertoire, the special request sparked the search for passion fruit liqueur and vanilla vodka in remote, rural Odemira.

Maracuja (passion fruit) booze was easier to find than expected, not so much vanilla vodka, but with a little magical syrup-making Oda transformed the Valley of the Bars into the Valley of the Porn Star Martinis.

The group were from a fantastic range of backgrounds and included an actor, a dentist, an author and an astronomer; a moth and butterfly expert who educated us all; and a nurse (whose skills were only required once or twice).

They set up on the calçada deck outside our Clubhouse and painted the view we fell in love with when we first found this spot in 2018.

They sketched the surf from the comfort of Bar de Praia in Almograve, inspired by the sun, the sand...and the strawberry daiquiris.

They learned a bit of history through one of our wine story-tastings and met the French/British couple behind the delectable new Delância wine – with a fabulous artistic and colourful label with a story to match.

They all seemed to love their stay, and for us it was a great lesson in how to prepare the meals, run the logistics and understand where to bring in extra staff next time.

Speaking of next time... anyone fancy another painting retreat in April 2026??

Speaking of next time... anyone fancy another painting retreat in April 2026??

It also taught us that group getaways are certainly the way we’d like to go as it can all be planned and organised well ahead of time.

We have our first yoga group coming in a couple of weeks, a big corporate retreat in January – a collaboration with the fantastic nearby Orada retreat centre and were recently visited by an Ayurvedic retreat leader looking to run training classes in Portugal.

And it seems a lot of all sort of people like the idea of a few days away in the beauty and silence of places like Alentejo...without necessarily the need for 6am exercise classes.

Just this morning I saw an article in The Times about Reading Retreats (paywall) – retreats where you just read and relax...reading retreat leaders look no further!

With the clocks going back and the nights closing in, we’ll certainly be reaching for a good book this winter, and hope we can lure a few of you to join us.

And in case you needed any more persuasion, we’re still offering a 15% discount for all stays through November with the code BLOG25 when you book here.

It’s been both exhilarating and exhausting, but we couldn’t have asked for a better summer start to the latest stage of our off-grid Portuguese adventure.

And this week we enjoyed something which a few months ago would have been utterly terrifying in the face of an rapidly expanding overdraft...a night with no guests.

As the kids started to drift back to school and the summer holidays started slowly coming to an end, a gap in our arrivals calendar allowed us the luxury of coming up for air, getting some rest, and starting to think beyond the next breakfast, lunch, dinner (or all three...on the same day).

We ended the summer with a flourish...dinner for 16, wine tasting for 12, a short but first proper retreat and then a very welcome little lull.

Somehow – for two months – we’ve kept the treadmill of arrivals and departures going without too many mess-ups or laundry-lacking panics.

Our personal washing production line is tested enough by all the towels, so we outsource our sheets to a fabulous laundrette half an hour’s drive away in Vila Nova de Milfontes.

Only once amid the madness did we reach for the iron, despite having bought three times more sheets than we needed, and thankfully we were just four pillow cases short before the overworked launderers saved our skins.

Some would call it bad planning, we call it learning by doing: we set out at the start of the summer with a ‘bring-it-on’ attitude to running an eco-luxe lodge.

In June we didn’t even know if anyone would come, let alone test our laundry logistics.

Even with the wonderful Oda spending six weeks helping us through our first season – crafting cocktails, clinking wine glasses and making meals – it’s been a blur of guests, welcome tours, beach and restaurant advice and many, many lovely people.

We have the best guests hands down and haven’t had a bad one yet...and the great reviews continue to flow in.

Krishna has been cleaning like a demon, turning around rooms in a few short hours to keep all the people coming and going.

We now understand what tourist season means: everybody working in the bars, the restaurants and the tourist lodges of Odemira is absolutely exhausted.

Some places have closed already, either to take some late summer sunshine themselves, or to sit in a quiet, darkened room with a stash of sedatives.

Others are powering on...knowing it’ll be quieter in the off-season and sprinting towards the finishing line.

But as the families are returning home from the beaches, the walkers hiking the Rota Vicentina long-distance foothpath are back in force...extending the season well into the winter and with it the workload.

We always planned to be open for much of the year – that’s why we installed underfloor heating – but didn’t expect the clifftop trail and the historic inland path which cuts through the bottom of our valley to bring so many more visitors to the area.

Now we have the time to properly promote our three night stays for the walkers looking for a little more luxury: a daily, backpack-free hike followed by a dip in the pool, a slap up dinner, a new wine each evening and a hearty breakfast to set them up for the next day.

We’re also getting all the logistics in place for our painting retreat with Ed Sumner at the beginning of October.

The paint and the canvases has arrived, the winemakers are ready and from the WhatsApp group, the attendees appear to be getting excited!

We’ve have had a cancellation...so there is space for one more person (or two people sharing) to join...please get in touch...here’s the info: it starts on October 3rd.

Suddenly the sun is setting earlier, the mornings and evenings are that little bit cooler and we even had some rain last week.

It was very much welcomed by the plants who’ve suffered from my only occasional irrigational interventions, and I was so out of touch that the remnants of Hurricane Erin took me totally by surprise.

Guests had been mentioning how the red beach flags had been flying and the ocean was in turmoil, but even the 20^th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina didn’t draw my usually weather-curious eye to the satellite images.

As I was being interviewed on BBC Radio 5Live recalling memories of reporting on the storm hitting New Orleans (on BBC Sounds here at 1.39’00”), I was utterly unaware that one of the largest hurricanes ever recorded was churning around the Atlantic, flooding New Jersey and moving Iberian beaches.

Only in the last few days have I realised just how much sand has moved and changed the shape and flow of our favourite beaches as it usually does only in the Spring.

Thankfully Erin didn’t make landfall – but its last band of rain which hit the UK and barely clipped our coast gave me a little reminder that the long summer days of endless solar power are coming to an end.

It robbed us of a clear lunar eclipse (although day 2 of the blood moon was still pretty special), but more importantly the batteries went flat and our power went off.

I’ve always been obsessed with monitoring our solar system, but for some reason I didn’t turn off the pool or water treatment pumps, ran washing machine-loads of towels all day, left a load of lights on and then started the 3-phase industrial dishwasher before the sun came up.

Thankfully our guests were checking out and the gas cooker provided all they needed for breakfast, but I was a little shell-shocked by my own complacency...and that’s definitely a good thing.

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Our systems have been remarkably robust, aside from the little power cut and the occasional water “pump cavitation.”

Whether it was a leaking pipe or a pump “running out of curve,” we would have loved a little more attention from our water engineer, but for an off-grid system and an average of 18 people a night, it’s been impressive for season 1.

After our quietish week guests are starting to return to Vale das Estrelas and September is already starting to look busy.

We love all the readers and listeners taking advantage of our special blog-following discount...and by way of apology for my six-week absence from Substack, we would like to extend that offer into October.

We’ve happily eroded our overdraft and our young business is going well, but we could really do with your support to help us through winter.

If you go onto our website and booking engine here and then enter the promotional code BLOG25 you’ll get a 15% discount for the rest of September and the whole of October (but don’t tell anyone).

In my old life, the silly season was the summer lull when everyone went on holiday and we needed to find quirky stories to fill the airwaves.

I’m not sure “silly” is the right word for the mad world and relentless news cycle that continued throughout the summer, but that lull is certainly over...it’s been quite a week.

Israel bombed a new country; American political tension exploded with an assassination; France, Japan and Nepal all lost their prime ministers; Russian drones entered Polish and Romanian airspace; and NASA (maybe) discovered life on Mars.

Exhausting isn’t it? And those were just the top stories.

But this news hound now listens to classical music, we still marvel every evening at our amazing view at orange time and pink time, the reorganised beaches are beautiful, and you really can get away from it all.

Come to the Valley of the Stars: we’re in the country, on the coast and off the grid. And above all, it’s quiet here.

And having welcomed quite a few guests already this summer, we love seeing their words left on the website reviews sections even more.

Obviously the five out of fives and the ten out of tens aren’t going to last forever, but right now we’re loving it...and loving the people enjoying our infinity pool, those doing a wine story tasting, having breakfast, or joining one of our big-table family-style meals.

“Congratulations” said Pedro as I introduced our latest guest and his partner to the valley, explaining how we fell in love with the view at first sight and how it was all a eucalyptus forest just a few years ago.

I’d just explained their arrival had brought us a full house for the first time – all rooms occupied and one hopeful guest sadly having to be turned away.

It was another marvellous milestone on this journey towards running our own little eco-luxe lodge in Alentejo.

Our first full house involved an interesting mix of Dutch, Portuguese, French and British folk who somehow stumbled upon us and arrived curious about what we’ve done, or just in need of some well-earned summer rest.

The following day was a second – not quite so impressive milestone – our first overbooking.

We’re getting to grips with the software which keeps all the calendars on all the various booking sites up to date, but we made a mistake filling in the cleaning schedules spreadsheet and it left us thinking we had a room when we didn’t.

Easy to do...much harder to resolve.

Thankfully our friends at nearby Monte de Silveira had an open room and we were able to solve the problem before the guests even realised there was a problem.

In July that’s tough but possible...in August everything will be packed, so we can’t make that mistake again! A good lesson early on.

Speaking of which, the calendar is now a sea of colour...we’ve been overwhelmed by just how many people have booked...and how many keep calling every day asking if we can fit them in.

We’ve had a wonderful range of guests: German newlyweds on their honeymoon, a Polish couple who loved their wine and their wine tasting, two Spanish guys working in the area and loving the pool in the evenings.

The banking consultant who helped us buy our flat in Lisbon more than 10 years ago arrived to celebrate her birthday and we managed to get a dinner together.

Rachael, Daisy and Ed the painter stayed a week – Ed will be back in October for his painting retreat (just one space left!).

We hosted our first Valley Sessions event featuring businessman and candidate for the Portuguese presidential election, Tim Vieira to talk politics and answer some tough questions over wine.

Mauro the winemaker walked the soon-to-be vineyard with me suggesting when to do what to the land, how many bush-vines to plant and which grape varieties to mix in.

There have been so many wonderful people...and all have left very kind comments.

Two young women arrived in a taxi happy to spend all day in the pool and relaxing in the shade – we usually tell people coming by car gives you a much better chance to explore, but these guys were incredibly happy just hanging out here!

September is also starting to get busy and that’s a fantastic time of year on this coast, with the ocean at its warmest and the summer rush of tourists having past.

That’s why we’d like you to come and see us!

If you go onto our website and booking engine here and then enter the promotional code BLOG25 you’ll get a 15% discount from our soft-opening rates for the whole of September (but don’t tell anyone).

It’s a huge relief after all the worries about whether people would find us, whether they’d like the place and whether they’d tell their friends about their time “In the country, on the coast and off the grid”...as we sometimes put it.

Well, they have. We’re actually doing it...we’ve built it and they are coming...

It’s been a little over five years since we arrived in Portugal in the middle of COVID and the diplomat/journalist couple who’d bounced around the world for decades decided to give up their old lives and try running a business.

In retrospect, the first few years were easy: we just had to spend money – now we have to make it.

Regular readers will know how funny those retrospective words sound, given the challenges we’ve faced with funding, battling bureaucracy for permissions, project managing the construction and working out all the off-grid infrastructure.

We almost gave up a couple of times as inflation soared, paperwork stalled so long we almost lost our funding and we battled to keep control of our budget.

Naivety has certainly been our friend.

For three years worries over water kept us awake at night, but now there’s lovely, soft minerally water running from the taps and the off-grid systems are holding up well to the high demand.

There’s still plenty of DIY work to do tweaking the occasional leaking pipe and putting in some extra infrastructure, but the focus has switched to something we’re more practiced at: providing people with a warm welcome.

It did lead me to the realisation I didn’t have any nice clothes left, having trashed them all working on the land.

Thankfully Ana discovered a hidden box of the smart shirts I used to wear while reporting for the BBC – crisply collared shirts worn with the sleeves rolled up in whatever war zone I’d been thrown into.

Now it’s a fabulous roller-coaster ride of guests arriving and departing as a new and steeper learning curve of invoicing, payment systems and booking engines is providing the stress we’ve been missing since we got our license.

At least the money is now coming in as well as going out.

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We take turns leading a little tour explaining what off-the-grid means...urging people to try and beat the 5-minutes’ worth of sand in the hour glass when they shower.

Anyone showing a brief flash of additional interest soon regrets it, as I get into the weeds on pipes, pumps, LPWAN monitoring systems, pH regulators and salt sensors.

(On that note, I have a short radio documentary going out this week on the rise of LPWAN and the Internet of Things) on the BBC’s Business Daily programme – not sure exactly which day yet, but it’ll appear here when they’ve filled the schedule).

I officially bore myself now when I enthusiastically dive down the water-filled rabbit hole and confuse people with TLAs (three letter acronyms).

Amid busy and creative breakfast-making – and the fun bit of getting to know our guests who’ve somehow discovered us from all over the world – there’s a new sea of bureaucracy that any small business owner will recognise.

Invoices, three different rates of VAT (IVA here) and balancing the books has taught us how we’re just one part in a complicated system of helping other people making money...out of us.

Everyone seems to get their cut, but I guess that’s just how the world works.

Luckily the local parish council levelled our dirt road just in time for the summer rush – still providing guests with a suitable amount of adventure, but without as much risk to their vehicles.

Thankfully the guests who I accidentally (and massively) undercharged the other day came back to say they owed us money after realising my mistake.

Business basics.

They say ignorance is bliss...and we enjoyed being Off-grid and Ignorant in Portugal for ages...but now we have to step up and know what we’re doing.

There are big laundry and recycling runs – to drop off the empties from our wine tasting events – visits to the local butcher and the lovely lady at the little cheese shop to show off to guests all the wonderful things we’ve discovered since we arrived.

And there’s something strangely satisfying about one-day turn-around of rooms as one set of guests leave just as another group arrives.

Our marketing education resumes whenever we come up for air, and amid the demands of high tourist season, we make plans and put out posts for painting retreats and walking holidays in the autumn and spring.

It’s a new and fun stage in our transformation from international travellers to hosts and professional entertainers.

We took a bet on our beautiful view and so far everyone seems to agree with us...that this part of coastal Alentejo is something very special with its wild beaches, hidden coves and great restaurants.

We’ve still got a long way to go, but I think we’re heading in the right direction.

Since most schools were out from early June the festivities have been off to a flying start with both the unusually hot weather arriving unseasonably early this year...and with a football trophy.

Beating the old enemy Spain on penalties in the UEFA Nations League final set the tone for the opening holiday weekend, then came Portugal Day and the celebration of the national epic poet was quickly followed by the Santos Populares – or Popular Saints celebrations.

If you try to get anything done in Lisbon during the second week of June around St Anthony’s Day, the phones ring out as the city comes to a standstill of block parties awash in a sea of sardines.

And there are three popular saints: António, João and Pedro. Porto goes St João crazy on the 23^rd and then June rounds off with St Pedro...and that is really just the start.

Across the country, live music stages are popping up on every street corner and you can’t move for parades, bunting and long outdoor dining tables.

Here in coastal Alentejo it’s the Marchas Populares which bring the Sagres and Super Bock beer kiosks out of winter storage and music to the town squares.

Our nearest town of São Teotónio has its annual ceiling of handmade paper ribbons as the traditional mastros festival (of masts) is underway, and across the country traditional town celebrations and full-on music festivals fill the calendar from now until the autumn.

On the praias, big sea swells have been keeping the surfers entertained and the beach guards on high alert; our supermarkets are newly stocked with suncream and beach umbrellas and the summer people are starting to arrive.

Having just opened our doors for guests at our new tourist lodge – and being happily surprised at the number of bookings we’re already getting – we don’t have as much time as we did to join in the parties.

But we’ve been celebrating in our own way...with the arrival of our first member of staff to be officially on our books: Krishna Shrestha from Waling in the western region of Nepal (a bit south of Pokhara).

Krishna is a machine, whether it’s gardening, cleaning, building, or as it turns out cooking (as we signed the contract he casually mentioned working for years as an assistant chef in Dubai).

We’ve known Krishna a while now and are delighted to have him as our first employee...especially as there’s so much to do in Vale das Estrelas.

Hot on the heels of our first hire, we acquired our second member of staff, and in the fast-changing world in which we live, it will be no surprise to hear we recruited a robot.

Our daughter Oda hit the perfect creative chord by calling the pool cleaning WyBot Herbert Hoover. Herbie is already making a big impact on the infinity pool...if not yet and beyond.

While Ana selflessly held the fort for our guests, I did manage a couple of hours at one event that no self-respecting establishment like ours can afford to miss: the local tourism festival Fei-Tur.

Being in the biggest regional tourist town of Vila Nova de Milfontes and on the fabulous Mira River estuary, the FEIra de TURismo do SW leans heavily on the river and ocean sports side of things with surf schools and stand up paddle boarding.

But it’s a feira packed with local producers, peddling cheese and wine, honey and olive oil, preserves and cakes com or sem gluten and on the strong booze front, a muddle of Medronho-makers (or whatever the collective noun might be: a mess? a mash? a murder? Let’s hope not).

It was a collection of exactly the kind of people we need to meet in order to keep our guests happy.

Our fabulous lawyer Ana Aleixo treated her husband Sérgio to a surprise Vale das Estrelas staycation, our brilliant bank manager Wilson Gonçalves dropped by with the family to see what all the money’s been spent on, and we’ve been welcoming some pioneering guests who found us online and wanted to be the first to discover our place (and tell their friends).

We’ve been making daily breakfast spreads for a lovely German couple, a few young Lisbonites have been spending nights escaping the big city and our first venture into painting retreats with Ed Sumner in October is pretty much sold out already.

A big part of what we want to do is introduce visitors to the tastes of Alentejo – the wines from the interior and from our region, the fresh fish and the black pork, and so a local tourism fair was the perfect place to collect a tote-bag full of business cards and flyers and a notebook full of numbers.

It was also a great reminder of all the things visitors to our area can see and do – beyond visiting all the beautiful beaches – and it means I’ll have to update the guides left in our rooms for guests.

Horse riding, motorcross schools, freediving courses, bird watching guides, kayak tours and boat trips, and foiling...whatever that is.

But at the heart of it all is the hundreds of kilometres of walking and cycling paths which are bringing thousands more visitors to our Costa Vicentina every year.

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The number of people hitting the trails is growing at an astonishing rate – the bars and restaurants along the clifftop route of the Fisherman’s Trail are constantly busy with resting hikers from all over the world newly discovering our wild Atlantic coast.

The Rota Vicentina had a whole line of exhibition tents at this year’s Fei-Tur festival and was promoting cycling routes as well as the stunning inland long-distance hiking path and the circular trails.

Pedro Almeida is the head of cycling, and was buzzing with excitement over the free downloadable maps, a new range of automatic bicycle service stations and how electric bikes are attracting a new type of cyclist.

“The Fisherman’s Trail is incredibly popular as people want to see the coast – and it’s a beautiful coast,” said our friend Pedro.

“But we have so many circular walking and cycling routes and we’d like to bring people here for slow tourism and natural tourism – to spend more time in one place and learn more about the local food and culture.”

Many long-distance hikers stay in a different town or village each night as they track all or some of the 226.5km from São Torpes (near Sines) to Sagres and across to Lagos.

Sunday Times chief foreign correspondent Christina Lamb – a friend from when I lived in Afghanistan – visited while walking a long stretch of the Fisherman’s Trail.

Wearing her travel writer’s hat she seemed to enjoy the hike and visiting our place in an area she first discovered many years ago.

Like many others she used a tour company to shuttle her luggage around. Transport companies are thriving and the local guesthouses are heaving, but they have a a lot more work to do with one-night stops rather than week-long visits.

It is something we’ve already realised running a small eco-luxe lodge: the costs of cleaning and laundry push us towards a two or three night minimum stay.

But with trailhead drop-offs and pick-ups, local bike hire suggestions, scenic circular routes, and a peaceful place to return to — where guests can rest their legs by the pool after a long day on the trails, sip a glass of Alentejo wine, and enjoy a fresh fish or black pork dinner with a stunning view— we believe we’re offering something really special.

“We want to encourage responsible travel and responsible tourism: to attract people to do more different activities. There are boat rides, a bird watching festival – and of course cycling,” said Pedro.

“The great thing about e-bikes now is you don’t have to be an athlete or to bring your own bike with you – you just need to know how to ride a bike and then you can discover more places.”

And as luck would have it, the focus of the Rota Vicentina circular walking and cycling paths is all around us and the inland Historical Way crosses the bottom of our valley.

The SW coast of Alentejo is well worth a visit...for hiking, biking, wine tasting, surfing...and foiling (whatever that is).

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We love our Atlantic coast and while we keep quiet about our hidden coves and wild beaches, a lot more people are now starting to discover this still quite secret corner of the country.

So now’s the time to come and see us...before everyone else does!

A very wet winter has given everything an extra spurt of growth, and now that the days are getting longer and sun is getting stronger it’s a jungle out there.

The dogs have shed their muddy socks and now bring dust rather than wet pawprints into the house.

And the Scarab Cult are back – the annual bombardment of drunken beetles careering into the house and heading for “the flame...the flame” obsessed as they are with our gas stove.

Apparently they get smashed on honeycombs and then inexplicably make a beetle-line for the kitchen.

Simon the dog used to chase them, but these days the old man is more obsessed with bothering us and our neighbour Daniel for human food and snoozing than chasing bugs...however much he used to like the crunch.

We catch each one, try to persuade it that life is worth living and then launch it back into the wild hoping it can stay off the honeycomb, out of the hive-bars and not be lured back to the flame.

It’s that trimming strimming time of year again when I dust off the weed whacker and reacquaint myself with our land patch by daily patch...shedding a few pounds in the process.

The legal deadline for fire-prevention land-clearing within 50m of every building was thankfully pushed back until the end of May as usual, but it’s a time consuming business with more buildings built and temperatures rising.

A dodgy knee hasn’t helped, but there is something very calming about spending hours methodically clearing hillside patches of esteva (rock rose) and silves (brambles)...and the instant gratification that brings.

It’s nice to actually see the fruits of our labour as our indoor work is mostly sending messages out into the social media ether without the immediate feedback.

We’re fine-tuning our video and photography, delving into design software and experimenting with Facebook ads and Instagram reels to reach the people – that we know are out there – who will love the wonderful place we’ve created.

It turns out there’s more to it than just “build it and they’ll come.”

We had a crazy idea, made a plan, got a loan, learned how to build, how to install a fully off-grid power and water system for a small hotel and somehow beat the bureaucracy to open something truly remarkable...in record time.

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Having retrained as builders and project managers, we are reinventing ourselves once again as marketeers, IT experts, accountants, social media super-spreaders, hosts, chefs, landscapers, gardeners and event organisers.

Now we’re working around the clock to manage everything and make it all work.

We’re fluctuating wildly between the fear of failing and having every confidence we’ll succeed – in the sense of having money coming in as well as going out, which I’m told is quite important.

We’ve been blown away by the people visiting us and staying with us who have been so brilliantly baffled by the beauty...and spontaneously asked why our prices are so low.

It’s our opening year and we really want expectations to be exceeded – and it’s hard on a website to do justice to the peace and quiet, all the nature and the open spaces.

And it’s great to hear from people even more convinced than we are that we can make a success out of this crazy adventure.

We are still caught deep in the weeds trying to get our booking engine activated, as connecting to the sites where people go to search for holiday homes has been an inexplicably uphill struggle.

A bad user always blames his bad user experience, but linking Booking.com, Expedia and AirBnB to our own “channel management system” has been the equivalent of cutting through a bamboo forest with a blunt blade.

Days of our lives we will never get back have been spent adding multiple photos and detailed descriptions, trying to avoid double bookings, one-night stays (due to cleaning costs), and dogs...at least for now, until Garfunkel and Albie get used to guests.

After weeks of helplines and service desks some apartments still aren’t appearing online and rooms people want somehow can’t be reserved.

It’s perhaps reassuring that the lower than expected booking numbers may be our own fault, but now we need bom dias on beds sooner rather than later.

In many respects we’re lucky the season hasn’t quite got started yet as it gives us time to finish things off properly and to do the noisy stuff every morning...like cutting the grass.

But it’s a nervous time for us first-time entrepreneurs and with loan repayments already fleeing our account, my childhood eczema is back and we’re both running around figuratively (and sometimes literally) shouting “Don’t Panic! Don’t Panic!”

We’ve realised the best way to settle our nerves is to create retreats we can plan for ahead of time – package deals including pickups and drop-offs, meals and activities.

There are far too many great yoga and wellness retreat centres in the neighbourhood, but with artist friends like Ed Sumner we’ve started proposing painting retreats and get-away-from-it-all weeks based around walking and wine.

There’s been a huge surge of people hiking the Rota Vicentina clifftop trails on this last wild coast in Europe, many stopping in a different place every night.

But we’re building a package plan to pick people up and drop them off each day so they can do stretches of the route while basing themselves in on place: in the Valley of the Stars.

I’d happily spend three or four nights walking in the morning, relaxing by the pool in the afternoon and then trying a local dish and a new Portuguese wine every evening...all while avoiding luggage logistics.

And if people aren’t obsessed with walking every single step of 200-plus kilometres of the Fisherman’s Trail or the Historical Way in a straight line, then the lovely circular routes nearby for some light hikes – or rides on bikes – can give structure to a very relaxing week.

So if any of this might be of interest to you or people you know please get in touch and we’ll test out some package plans.

As I write, the sun is already getting higher in the sky and the shrubbery isn’t going to cut itself, the scratching sound of a hungover beetle trapped in a plastic bag is calling for an intervention and Simon the dog wants some human breakfast.

We’re discovering how tough it is to get a business up and running from scratch when the personal stakes are so high.

But we’re also in a very beautiful place surrounded by pets and wildlife, a chorus of birdsong, and plenty of sunshine and wild beaches.

With the undergrowth cleared and the clay firm underfoot we have a pretty open path to our first summer season.

When the traffic lights went dark, petrol stations closed and panic struck the ice cream shops of the nearby tourist towns on our southwestern coast of Alentejo, we could rest easy.

Our freezer-load of wild boar (wild boar) wasn’t defrosting, our water pumps were working well and our wine remained nicely chilled.

While the lights went off across the Iberian peninsula, a healthy hum was heard from our control centre as our 84 solar panels were piling power into our batteries as usual.

We have the storage capacity of a large electric vehicle – a BMW or a Porsche Taycan – and yesterday when the lights went out we felt very much at the luxury end of the market.

We were buying fruit trees when the plant nursery billing system went down.

People in Vila Nova de Milfontes were standing in shop doors and milling around street corners burning through the last of the mobile phone tower batteries for online information and updates to understand why the “apagão” or power cut, had happened.

There was much speculation at the coffee-less cafés over what, or whom, might have been responsible for the outage.

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The explanation as to why the whole of Portugal and Spain lost electricity for many hours has to get a lot better for people to stop thinking it was Mr Putin, Mr Trump or a cabal of satanic paedophiles.

I do tend to lean heavily into cock-up over conspiracy, but I’ll admit my work countering Russian disinformation led my first suspicions towards a Russian cyber-attack.

But we were fine.

After years of learning to live off the grid, the thousands of euros of investment, power cuts and teething troubles, our system finally came into its own.

From the early days when we moved into our new off-grid home in the Portuguese countryside in the middle of the COVID pandemic we’ve been playing catch up with power.

We have learned the hard way what a lot of people realised yesterday – just how much power we consume every day and how dependent we are on electricity

The off-grid system which came with our house provided a lot less energy than we were used to – even moving from Kenya where power cuts were common, but we had a generator in the garden.

Toasters and ovens are the biggest culprits – and I’ll never use my hairdryer while ironing ever again!

After failing to keep the giant Tamagotchi of a lead-acid battery system alive we installed new panels and lithium batteries for us...and then for the 20 plus people we can cater for at the eco-luxe lodge we’ve just opened.

Three phases, hundreds of meters of buried cables, a lot of maths and fuse boxes later and we are...smug.

Last week my mornings had begun with a nervous eye on the app, as 17 Easter guests and some pretty rainy and cloudy weather tested the system, which happily passed with flying colours.

But while the rest of the region was powerless to do anything, our batteries were at 100%, our satellite connection kept the communications going and we were one of the few restaurants still open.

We hadn’t planned on making a fish braai for our guests Robert and Kim – and we’re not even a restaurant – but in the absence of a mobile phone signal to even ask the best seafood places if they were open, we confidently offered a three course meal complete with electric light.

The candles were merely for effect.

And the country-wide shortage of internet connectivity led a BBC producer back to my WhatsApp and the offer of a chance to play at my old job for an afternoon.

BBC Radio 4’s PM programme in the UK was interested in “some colour” from Odemira so Ana and I headed off for a wander (hear the story 38 mins in here).

Our local Intermarché supermarket boss was almost as smug as we were – because their massive generator was keeping the meat and fish cold, the freezers below zero and the ATM cash machine running.

There was a touch of the early COVID days about it – even if the toilet roll stocks remained largely undisturbed.

We bumped into our friend Francisco from the A Terra glamping lodge – everything had gone off at his place and so he was at the ATM paying for 20 new solar panels.

“Because tomorrow the price is going to be crazy,” he told me.

“I should have bought them a long time ago, but now it needs to be done.”

Glenn Cullen who with his wife Berny runs a beautiful tourism lodge called Paraiso Escondido was also at the supermarket stocking up on water to help guests flush.

“The power cut’s a bit inconvenient...to say the least,” he told me.

“We rely on pumps for the water, electricity as we’d expect for the power, so cooking – breakfast, lunch, dinners. We do have gas in one of our kitchens, so we have got a standby.

“It’s a bit of a worry and something we have to think about for the future. Already we’re talking about getting generators to have backup. We have solar for hot water, but all the other things we take for granted: every day you turn the tap on, you flick a switch and communication – the WiFi is down. We rely on it so much.”

I do care a lot about ice cream – and was keen to volunteer my services to stop large amounts of it going to waste, so next stop was beach-front Zambujeira-do-Mar and Rita’s Restaurant.

Nuno Rita explained the gelato was straight into the freezer as soon as the lights went out and the door would remain shut until it came back on again.

“It will be fine as long as the power comes back within a day,” he explained, as much to my disappointment I realised my ice cream eating sacrifice was not going to be immediately required.

The Sunset Café was packed – André had his sleeves rolled up and was washing dishes while hikers on the long-distance walking trail Rota Vicentina were fuelling up on lunch.

“Traditional work – no lights, washing glasses with my hands, salads, sandwiches and Portuguese bifanas,” he said, talking about the traditional bread rolls filled with thin pork steaks he was dishing out to walkers.

I’m pleased to say it was a mere 17 hours that our region was without electricity.

Our neighbour Daniel was up before dawn as usual and spotted a distant glow from the nearby town at around 5.15am.

Now is a great time to talk about community micro-grids rather than national grids, and how renewable energy can be better managed at a local level...however much the giant power providers may protest.

Solar panels have never been cheaper, but integrating small systems into national grids are not as easy as the “sell your renewable power back” offers suggest.

Our friend Niels discovered it was costing him money to sell his excess power to the grid and so invested in large water tanks and heaters to create different types of “battery” instead.

And our neighbour Jeff in Lisbon had taken steps towards energy independence by installing panels, but because he is connected to the grid he couldn’t use them when the blackout happened.

While conservative newspapers say the Iberian power cuts prove renewable energy can’t work at scale - because of the huge steps Spain and Portugal has made towards running on green energy - we have to remember that it must.

It’s perhaps more down to the traditional systems and the big, rich power companies which need to change and adapt.

And it’s also a good reminder that come the next zombie apocalypse we should be fine – all we need is a couple of extra shovels to hit them with and maybe a shotgun.