My grandfather, Neville Monkhouse, didn’t teach me how to fish, kick a football or do a magic trick. Instead, he showed me how to drop everything and go. I call him Parma, a family nickname, and he travelled the length and breadth of the world until well past a sensible age. Parma took me and […]
The taxi driver who picked us up at Lisbon airport at the start of our Portugal travels gave us some friendly advice. He said: ‘Go to Algarve for the beach, Lisbon for culture, Oporto for wine and Coimbra for learning.’ Indeed. Coimbra, in the central region known as the Beiras, hosts Portugal’s oldest university that gleams […]
The Portuguese are very stylish and intensely proud of their art, food, culture and history. The fiercest examples of this pride were on display in Porto, the great city sitting astride the Douro River and the Atlantic Ocean. Porto is world famous for its architecture, which is a heady mix of the ancient, the modern […]
Hit the twisting highway north from Lisbon and you’ll find yourself in a landscape a little like the mid-west region of Western Australia. The bleached yellow sunlight beats down on undulating land pocked with little settlements and green bursts of forest and scrub. There are rows and rows of towering eucalyptus trees lining the road […]
