Sagres

Henry the Navigator built a fortress here in the belief that it was the end of the world. His school of navigation is here as well and the town only has around 2000 residents. Besides a light house, that’s pretty much all there is to see. So Julie and I have been to the end of the world as they knew it (Sorry, I had to). The wind here never seems to stop which makes it seem cool and the town is a fair distance away from the ocean for this reason. We also found that there were so many different sized rocks everywhere we walked or drove. It was truly amazing to be here, walking along the cliff and to see the ocean so far below. They changed the hours of operations for the fortress and school so we had only a half hour to have a look around, so we ended up running for some of it and missed out on the school. We could have changed our minds and decided to see it the next morning, but there really wasn’t much else to do and it reopened at 10am. We decided to free camp outside the fortress in its parking lot and at one point during the night we were serenaded by a bunch of dogs. The next morning we made the short 6km drive to the lighthouse, the most southwestern point of Europe. We had hoped to meet the guy that mans the lighthouse for a chance to go up, but again the hours didn’t work for our schedule. So we didn’t hang around, we had two town stops to make, the last of which, we needed to be at before 2pm. The town hall in that town offers free internet access only until 2pm.