Tavira

Tavira

'It's in the Goldilocks zone.'
'What?'
'Maximum 19C.'

The principal cause of our holiday disputes is the temperature. On a weekend trip to Sweden, with an almost imperceptible dusting of snow, Sally refused to get out of bed. In retaliation, during a heatwave in Italy I was inseparable from the air conditioner. So 19C is neither too warm for me nor too chilly for Sally. It's not easy to find destinations which meet this criterion; Basingstoke does but has other disadvantages.

HF Holidays offers group walking holidays for people too unimaginative or too indolent to organise their own. On this trip, an elderly chartered accountant, epitomised the clientele and claimed to have been on over seventy HF jaunts over the preceding three decades. The unique selling point of the brand is the provision of at least two, sometimes three, guided walks each day so that all tastes and abilities are catered for, enabling couples with different levels of fitness to go on holiday together. Amusingly in deference to guests' sensitivities, the shorter walks are assiduously referred to as 'easier' rather than the more patronising 'easy'.

Our destination was Tavira, a small town on the Algarve which would be desiccating in summertime heat but pleasantly mild in March. Whispers of honeysuckle scented our balcony and tile-clad houses, fetchingly dilapidated, lined the street opposite. My study of estate agents' windows, a Londoner's obsession, revealed not only rock-bottom prices but a touching frankness in the descriptions: 'For sale, land with ruin' was trumped only by 'For sale, land with two ruins.' Such advertisements do find buyers: we met a Norwegian couple who had erected a makeshift bothy on land zoned as agricultural and lived there 'off grid' during the winter, returning to Norway in the summer to work.

It's not only property which is cheap; we calculated that we could have dined in Portugal for a week on the cost of our pre-departure dinner at the Gatwick Hilton, although that possibly reflected the inflated prices imposed on a captive clientele that mistakenly decided it would be cheaper to stay overnight at the airport than pay for an early morning taxi.

One walk took us along beaches populated by fishermen collecting shellfish by ploughing metal contraptions resembling supermarket baskets through wet sand, which looked like an exceptionally arduous way to earn a precarious living. On another day, we took to the hills, passing deserted holiday villas guarded by teams of vociferously barking dogs. In rage and frustration, one bared its teeth and clamped the metal railing in its jaws as we passed, an unnerving sight on a country walk. An especially elaborate edifice with a vast open air pool and manicured terraces was said to belong to Cliff Richard although we later discovered the owner was merely a Belgian plutocrat who only visited for a month each year but kept the place permanently staffed, just in case.

Our leader was genial and efficient if somewhat lacking in local natural history knowledge. On being asked to identify a colourful bird, he replied, 'It's a parity bird.' After a moment's confusion, we realised he hadn't a clue of the species and was merely likening it to a parrot. Flowers were safer territory and included the 'naked man orchid', remarkably appropriate when someone observed that 'orchid' is derived from the Greek for testicle.

A notable feature of the area, providing important habitats, are the mud flats. For a moment, I managed to convince Sally that, due to their water absorbing properties, these were originally called 'flood mats' and that the term had become Spoonerised to mud flats. Flamingoes were the main avian attraction but to my disappointment they were white rather than pink. Salt is harvested from the flats and the chartered accountant spent much of the holiday trying to solve the conundrum I posed about whether it was more profitable to fill the evaporation lagoons frequently with small quantities of sea water or less frequently with larger volumes. At dinner, he could be seen scribbling increasingly abstruse formulas on a napkin.

On the final evening, we were bussed to a hotel on the site of a former tuna fishing village. For a century, tuna had ensured the prosperity of the region until in the nineteen sixties heedless exploitation meant it was no longer economic. Their technique entailed placing nets up to eight kilometres in length across the migration path of the tuna entering the Mediterranean from the Atlantic to breed. With spectacular lack of foresight, they chose to catch the fish on their way to breed rather than on their return journey in order to profit from the roe, thus guaranteeing the population decline. Traditionally the first tuna caught was given to the church and it was in the year that only one was landed that the industry ended. Perhaps they had been propitiating the wrong deity; ritual sacrifices to Neptune might have been more effective.

In the hotel's museum, we were shown a particularly gruesome black and white film made in the final days of the industry in which tuna were massacred with hooks, much in the way that baby seals are clubbed for the fur trade. And then, without a of trace of irony, we were ushered into the dining room and served a delicious dinner the centrepiece of which was, yes, tuna. At a time when the future of the UK's membership of the EU is being debated, it is sobering to reflect that such indiscriminate exploitation of natural resources is, to some extent at least, controlled by European legislation.

© David Thompson 2016