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.

Odiaxere is a small village found in the Lagos parish, a village not without its own charm but usually totally neglected by tourists because the EN125 makes up its main street and there is very little information about the place to begin with. And it’s a pity because the place has a long history that dates back to the Neolithic era.

Odiaxere makes for a great and little-known pit-stop in the greater Lagos region. The great advantage to the place not being a tourist hot-spot is that you can get some truly great traditional Portuguese food for considerably cheaper than you would in the more popular places. For instance you can expect to get the ‘plate of the day’ lunch for as little as six Euros, and that will include a glass of, usually, local wine. There’s a daily indoor market, as well as a couple of bars where the local meet and mingle.

Off the main road, you’ll find a garden square with lots of seating around a water feature. This is where you’ll see a rather large house with some impressive tile frontage as well as cast iron balcony. From the square you can also see the church and its impressive bell tower, the church having been rebuilt after the great earthquake of 1755. Its impressive stone-carved doorway is the original from the late 17^th century.

The Ribeir de Odiaxere will take you down to the ocean, it’s more of a stream than a small river actually, the Moorish word ‘odi’ meaning river.

One major characteristic of Odiaxere is that it used to be heavily involved in the salt industry and you can still see many salt beds, positioned in neat rows.