Rocha da Pena is a protected natural landscape and prominent table mountain located in the Algarve, near the town of Salir. Rising to bout 479 meters above sea level, it is one of the tall mountains of the region. It features a plateau roughly two kilometers long. At the top there’s two stone walls, possibly from the Iron Age, used by the Moors as a hiding place during the reconquest of Portugal. All of these are interesting facts about our destination today. They contributed to us choosing to go and visit. Really however, it was the best mountain hike we could find within reasonable distance that didn’t require us to set an alarm at the wee hours of the morning. It promised views, a good trail, some elevation gain and its 11-kilometres trail could be hiked in under 4 hours, leaving us plenty of daylight even if we left in the late morning.
We got up, showered, slathered ourselves in sunscreen in preparation for spending most of the day outside and headed out for breakfast at 📍Café Tinto. The coffee and sandwiches were delicious as before with the ever polite and helpful Canadian small talk.
The trail head was an hour drive north. There wasn’t much on the road other than a little bit of traffic. The trail head is conveniently located next to a bar (really a café). As it’s outside the town of Pena (a 30-minute walk or a 5-minute drive away), I would assume the people doing the trail are a significant portion of their business. The trail itself is easy to follow if not marked that often. We have to grant it to the trail maintainers if there’s a barb wire fence on one side and prickly fauna on the other, we don’t really need marking at regular intervals to follow the trail. Doing anything else would lead to flayed skin. The views on the trail, once we reached above 300m altitude, were pastoral and beautiful. We’re clearly in farm country. We started seeing more blazes and sign posts once we came out into the charming village of Penina (the small Pena?). The prickly bushes would have been sufficient to keep us going in more or less the right direction but, as we reached the summit, the bushes got further apart, making it a safe bet. At the summit we met a long line of piled rocks and a sign explaining it’s the Iron Age “wall”. If you had given me a hundred guesses I would not have guessed that. I would have mistaken it for a geological formation. Overall it was a beautiful hike that balanced the more coastal focus one gets in the Algarve region.
We concluded our last hike of the trip by drinking some sparkling water at the trailhead bar before heading home. We stopped at the grocery for some fruits and set up on the roof terrace to watch the sun set on Olhão for the last time this trip.
Dinner was at 📍Alma. Close to the water, on the one busy street in town. It’s a fairly new restaurant (Apple Maps doesn’t know about it yet and street view shows the place is for sale). We were unlucky with our order and it got “lost”. Our first half hour there was waiting in the hope of the couvert (bread and olives). Once we had reminded our server that we existed, our order was taken again and we started receiving food. Overall it was good. Not extraordinary and not at the level of our first meal in the city, but good enough.
Tomorrow we’re heading to Lisbon. We might not be hiking for the rest of the trip but we will be going up and down hills repeatedly. Depending on who you ask you’ll get a different number of hills in the city. Some will say seven, others eight. It probably depends on if they are more historically or geologically bent.