INTRODUCTION

In the spring and summer of 2012 I was reorganising the little library in the cultural centre in my adopted home village of Porches. Each morning as I walked up the stairs to the library housed in a small room in a corner of the first floor, I would pass a 26-year-old marble plaque on the wall paying tribute to a royal charter granted by the Portuguese monarch D. Dinis.  The plaque commemorates the 7ooth anniversary of the charter. I sometimes paused on the stairs to let the date sink in. It was granted by D. Dinis in 1286!

The history of Porches actually goes back a lot further….. But before we get into that, for those not familiar with the region, let’s establish the location we are talking about. Situated in the central section of the plain that runs parallel to the Algarve’s south coast, Porches lies about 50 km due south of the main gap between southern Portugal's two low mountain ranges, the Serra de Monchique and Serra do Caldeirão. They divide the Algarve from the much more expansive but much less populous Alentejo. Running east-west, these mostly afforested hills and farmed foothills form amphitheatres looking to the sea and the sun to the south.

Porches is the name both of a village and a wider area known in Portuguese as a freguesia, which translates to ‘parish’ in English. Porches is the most easterly of the four  parishes that make up the municipality  of Lagoa. It has an area of just 16.5 square kilometres and a permanent population of only about 2,300 (national census of 2011). The municipal area covers less than 90 square kilometres and has a total population of about 24,000, though these population figures swell considerably during the summer holiday season.

The town of Lagoa lies 5 km to the west of Porches. To the east, the villages of Alcantarilha and Pêra and the beachside holiday and fishing town of Armação de Pêra are all in the neighbouring municipality of Silves.

The beautiful stretch of coast from Armação de Pêra past Porches and on towards Carvoeiro, comprises golden beaches, rocky headlands, sheer cliffs, sheltered coves and some impressive sea caverns.

Since the onset of tourism as the Algarve’s main economic activity in the 1960s, a lot of construction in the form of hotels, exclusive resorts, condominiums and blocks of holiday apartments has taken place close to the coast. The building density lessens greatly, however, the farther one moves inland. Scattered individual homes of various shapes and sizes have largely replaced old farmhouses and humbler cottages in gently undulating and once intensively cultivated land. Much of the rural land now lies abandoned and forgotten. Wide tracts are occupied mostly by dense, natural vegetation on sandy soils or rocky terrain.

The compact village of Porches is set on a low hill right next to the  EN125 main road on the northern side of the parish. Most people drive by with barely a glance. They don’t know what they are missing. There is an awful lot more to the vicinity of Porches  than meets the eye. It is a fascinating place. The more one gets to know it, the more fascinating and intriguing it becomes. In the chapters that follow, I will try to explain why.

Porches is only one of four parishes in one of sixteen boroughs in the southernmost province of a relatively small country on the margin of the landmass of Europe. So along the way the focus will not always be tight. We need to draw back at times to see the place in context and to describe the bigger picture.