Imminent lockdown: where to go?
12th March 2020: With coronavirus spreading rapidly across Europe, we are weighing up our options. Our plan had been to travel north from Lisbon to Porto, then to travel inland, see northern Portugal, then travel through Spain and France to return to the UK and Ireland in the summertime. This suddenly looks like a decidedly unwise course of action.
We have been considering our options over the past 48 hours as the situation worldwide has been deteriorating. Our van neighbours last night attended The Mission in concert in Lisbon and were told that that was the final gig of the tour – all further concerts have been cancelled. They’re going to remain on in Lisbon and hope to return to the UK in a few weeks’ time. We feel it’s time to get ourselves to a safe spot, away from a city, and stock up with supplies, in case we can’t access shops in the coming weeks.
This is what remains of the stock of toilet paper in Lisbon Lidl
We have decided to return to the Algarve, in the hope of sitting out the period of danger in a quiet stop. We passed through the town of Silves, about 20 minutes inland from the Algarve coast, as we were driving north to Lisbon, two weeks ago. It’s a quiet little town; there’s a nice, small, clean motorhome site there, and it’s close to a supermarket. We are going to return there and hope for the best. We are trying not to panic or discuss it much in front of the children, for fear of worrying them. And we’re also trying to figure out how best we might cope with this situation while in a motorhome! We’re always going to need to leave the van to empty our waste water and fill up with fresh water, for example; how would we manage this in a full lockdown? Lots of unknowns.
This video clip shows us leaving beautiful Lisbon via the very long Vasco da Gama bridge. This is the longest bridge in the EU, at 12.3km in length. It was first opened to traffic in 1998, shortly before Expo ’98. It is named after the Portuguese explorer, Vasco da Gama, the first European to reach India by sea, in 1498.
Video recorded before we had learned how to pronounce Silves correctly 😂 (it’s ‘Silvsh’ not ‘Sil-ves’).
El Tajo is the longest river in the Iberian peninsula (Tejo in Portuguese, Tajo in Castillian, Basque and Catalan and Texo in Galician – from the Latin Tagus). The river rises in the Montes Universales in mid-eastern Spain and it flows mainly in a westerly direction, for 1,007 km through central and western Spain and then through central Portugal. The main cities the rivers passes through consecutively are Aranjuez, Toledo and Talavera de la Reina in Spain, and Abrantes, Santarém, Almada and Lisbon in Portugal.
There is a toll charged for vehicles travelling north, towards Lisbon, but not for those travelling south, so we were in luck.