Tag: Faro

There are two lounges at Faro Airport, one in the non-Schengen area which I’ve visited before, and this one in the Schengen area which I haven’t. When I entered the friendly member said that they were full, but I was welcome to come in and wait for a seat if I wanted. Nothing says premium travel quite like being invited to stand near the snacks and hope someone leaves.

I decided I’d invite myself to sit with a collection of other passengers as it’s surprising how social I can be when there’s the chance to eat chicken pies and crisps as well as drink coffee and beer. Incidentally, the two beers didn’t really surprise and delight, but I’m not sure that they were intending to be a craft beer venue.

Another chicken pie, which I very much rated, alongside two pastéis de nata. In terms of the ambience, it’s not great as most people didn’t have access to a table which is a little sub-optimal for eating and for getting work done.

The pastry selection.

I noticed a family group didn’t like their high seating table and so I swapped them for my sofa seat. Like some sort of angry cat, I like sitting high up and watching over things. I got another chicken pie to celebrate, because altruism requires fuel.

It’s a perfectly decent lounge in terms of the friendliness of the staff, the cleanliness and the food options. However, it’s simply too small and it was at or near capacity for nearly all of my stay. I was fortunate that I was able to get this table, which was also near a power point, but it’s not the most laid-back in terms of the atmosphere.

I’ve got my annual Priority Pass card and so my expectations for lounges are always quite measured. But they have just 39 seats available in this lounge (it’s 70 at the non-Schengen lounge) which is really quite a small number given how many flights are departing from the airport. Normal entry is €30 and I would be disappointed if I had paid this to find myself struggling for even anywhere to sit.

In my never-ending quest to report the mundane, I was so hot in Faro, although I’m not sure whether I’ve mentioned the weather, that I found a petrol station to pop into. I went in for a cold drink, but realised they also had a little café section, which felt like a significant upgrade from my original plan of standing outside looking like I couldn’t afford my own car. I wasn’t sure how much my espresso would cost, but it transpired to be about 70p. Across southern Europe they realise how to sensibly price their espressos….

I wasn’t entirely sure whether I was allowed to eat the crisps I had also purchased in the petrol station while sitting in their café area, but nobody said anything. I’m also not sure they seemed especially troubled by much behaviour generally, which is one of the quiet blessings of certain roadside establishments.

The drink I had chosen was Sumol and I’ve discovered that they have around fifteen different fruit flavours. This one is apple, mango and guava and it is a limited edition flavour tied to the eclipse on 12 August 2026. This is another rabbit hole that I didn’t know that I needed to go down, but I feel the need to try more Sumol flavours now if they put this much effort into this concept, reaching for the heavens and all that….. Travel broadens the mind, although occasionally it does so through a petrol station fridge.

Oh, the crisps were lovely as well.

I spent some of Tuesday morning visiting the Parque Natural da Ria Formosa, which was beautiful, fascinating and entirely too hot. This is always the difficulty with nature reserves in southern Portugal, they contain wonderful landscapes, wildlife, salt marshes, mudflats and lots of crabs, as well as the quiet sense that one is somewhere ecologically important, but they also contain the sun, which can be rather insistent and, frankly, sub-optimal.

There was, however, a glorious two-minute period when it poured with rain and everything suddenly became lovely. The air cooled, the path freshened up and I briefly felt content with the weather arrangements. Then, naturally, it stopped, the sun returned and the whole landscape resumed to being too hot. But, full credit to the local authorities, they’ve created a long boardwalk and it made the whole area much more accessible.

Anyway, that’s enough weather narrative, so some photos….

When walking near Faro I saw this road sign pointing towards Montenegro, which briefly confused me, as I had not expected to stumble across the Balkans quite so close to the airport. I was fairly sure that I had not accidentally walked from Portugal to the Adriatic, although given the heat I wasn’t ruling out mild hallucination. Have I mentioned that it was hot?

The explanation is obvious once I actually thought about the name, which is always slightly annoying in retrospect. Montenegro simply means “black mountain” or “dark mountain”, from ‘monte’ and ‘negro’. The country of Montenegro has a similar meaning, linked to the dark forested slopes of Mount Lovćen, while the Faro place name is said to come from a dark or densely wooded hill visible from the city. So this was not Portugal randomly borrowing the name of another country, but two places using the same fairly practical description. Sometimes a hill is dark, and people decide not to over-complicate matters.

There is something pleasing about these repeated place names, especially when they momentarily make a road sign look more exotic than it really is. For some reason I thought that there might be something more complex about this whole arrangement, but it was all quite logical.

I posted earlier about the fiddler crabs in Faro and, when I was looking for my aircraft video, I remembered that I had also filmed the crabs. This was presumably because, for a brief moment, I thought I was David Attenborough, albeit one with less gravitas, fewer camera crews and a much higher likelihood of getting distracted by airport infrastructure.

The video captures the little crabs scuttling about on the mudflats of the Ria Formosa, going about their business with much more purpose than I was managing in the heat. Did I mention that it was too hot?

I decided in the morning to walk to the beach in Faro and I saw a lot of little holes and I couldn’t initially work out what had made them. I briefly considered various possibilities, most of them wrong and involving baby anacondas, before deciding that I should perhaps stop inventing ecological theories and actually look more carefully.

When I looked more carefully, it was evident that there were thousands of these little crabs, known as fiddler crabs which were having a lovely time in the mudflats of the Ria Formosa. These are the sort of creatures that are easy to miss if one is walking too quickly, which I obviously wasn’t because it was far too hot for unnecessary athleticism.

The little crabs scuttling about on the mud and the males carrying one oversized claw like a tiny and deeply impractical handbag. They are generally identified as Afruca tangeri, formerly known as Uca tangeri, and they live in burrows on the intertidal mudflats. The enlarged claw is used by males for display, territorial behaviour and attracting females. Give the numbers of them, all seemingly doing useful things, it was all very charming to watch them early on a Tuesday morning in June…..

I was only staying overnight in Faro before flying to Warsaw and the hotel prices were more decadent than I’d like. The Ibis where I’ve stayed before was £80 and it’s quite a walk into the centre of Faro, so I was hoping for something nearer to the airport that I could just walk to.

I usually try and avoid apartments and the like because I fear that they take residences away from local people, but they are occasionally the only viable option. This was one of those occasions where my principles had a brief meeting with my budget and quietly stepped aside.

The walk to the accommodation took five minutes and that does reduce the whole stress of travel knowing that there’s not a complex transport arrangement at the other end.

The height of luxury. There was a bathroom next door and the whole arrangement was easy to check-in but that room was too hot.

The shared kitchen area.

The balcony which was more of a sun trap than anything else.

The night cost £30 which was much cheaper than a hotel would have been and it transpired to have been much more convenient. It didn’t have the luxury of a hotel room, and my friend Richard would have been appalled (as someone who struggles to go to an Ibis, let alone an Ibis Budget) but needs must….. It was cheap, close to the airport and perfectly adequate for one night, which is sometimes all accommodation needs to be. Not every stay has to be memorable other than it having a little place on this blog. Some stays merely need to not become a story for the wrong reasons and I’m pleased to say that this one managed that.