Monchique is located in the western Algarve and a great place to visit if you want to take a break from the beaches. With a car rental you can easily drive on the main road up to Monchique and you can just feel the adventure ahead thanks to the eucalyptus trees and yellow flowering mimosas lining the road.

You’ll find a bunch of local pottery shops, cafes and local restaurants lining the road, all of which more than willing to accept your patronage. Actually one of the most popular pastimes is to take a seat at one such restaurant and dig into some chicken piri-piri.

Once you reach the centre of Monchique you’ll find a revamped square with a restored nora – well – which features tin buckets meant to fill up a water tank, now functioning as a water feature. In the past, the nora was donkey-driven to pull up water from the well for as long as 10 hours a day.

As you might’ve noticed already all over the Algarve, the town square is a great place to find a couple of restaurants.

Walking around the place you’ll find bronze lifelike figures of adults and children as well as a working public laundry – the very manual, very labour-intensive type of public laundry – still used by the locals to was and scrub their clothes.

The main church features some wonderfully elaborate Manueline carvings on the exterior door and also in a religious vein, looking up into the hillside you can see the ruin of a 17^th century Franciscan monastery.

For the more alcohol-inclined visitor, you should try the local clear spirit called ‘Medronho’, similar to schnapps it is made by distilling the red strawberry-like fruit of the arbtutus tree/bush, it’s a strong and very acquired taste.

The 2012 edition of the festival was judged to be unsuccessful on several levels with the overall feedback from exhibitors indicating a lower than expected number of visitors and even the organizer, Portimao Urbis, admitted having lost money even considering, or maybe due to, it charging an entrance fee and attracting big name groups to the event.

Instead of trying again with the same setup and expecting different results, the festival’s management has decided to move the festival back to the people and just have one big party along the waterfront so that the local restaurants can heat up their grills and so that the entire local economy can benefit.

Historically speaking the sardine catch used to be unloaded at the quayside, so having the festival in this location is a fitting tribute. There are three famous outdoor restaurants here that have always served the freshest catch of the day possible, and after recent renovation the entire area is a pleasure to walk along.

Instead of the more limiting setup from last year, the 2013 Portimao Sardine Festival will see the people being invited to eat sardines in the local restaurants and the organizers will also make sure to add in a daily program of entertainment option along the waterfront.

Discussion are under way between the organizers and the restaurants to create a variety of suitable menus which will do the noble sardine full justice, as well as make them palatable to foreign tourists.

We should mention that the Portimao council is currently embroiled in the Portimao urbis scandal over funding and missing money so reducing the expenditure on this year’s festival shows some flexibility and sensible management in tune with local needs as well as maybe the requirements of the auditors.

Being located very close to the much larger and much better-known town of Armacao de Pera, Pera is usually associated with it, the former being located directly on the coast and still featuring a fishing industry.

The village gets its name because it sits on sandy soil which is ideal for the growing of pears, a fruit that was rather popular between the 16^th and the 18^th centuries. Interestingly enough, the variety grown here wasn’t that great for eating, but instead they turned it into marmalade or sun dried them. Other fruits that proliferated in the region were carobs and grapes, so much so that the Pera village has the carob and the grape on its coat of arms.

The neighboring village of Alcantarilha still holds an annual fair dedicated to dried fruits during the first week of September. The fair is a typical Algarve celebration, you come for one thing but get a bunch of many others, such as live music and stalls selling home-cooked food, as well as the opportunity to try the local vintage.

Back to Pera now, you can expect to find quite a few cobbled stone streets and two churches, which means that the village isn’t as small as you might initially think. One was built back in the 18^th century, being set on the highest point of the village and offering some great views of the coast and the surroundings.

The village has a pretty solid daily indoor fish market, lots of smaller shops and many bars and local restaurants where you can eat on the cheap.

You can make Pera part of a day-trip or a tour of the Algarve if you use some Algarve car rental services.