A Quinta

A quinta is akin to 'the fifth', akin to 'the farm', and akin to 'Thursday'; and "akin to" when said quickly in this sentence is pretty much how you say a quinta in Portuguese.

Uma quinta is what you call a farm in Portugal but it is also a homophone (steady on) for 'a fifth' when referring to a feminine noun, such as "Mum, Dad: may I present my fifth wife". It's also what the fifth day in the week is called when quinta-feira is shortened colloquially, to quinta. I still get Wednesdays and Thursdays muddled up and have to count up every time. Monday is second... segunda... Tuesday is third... terça... And, if my online etymological sources are to be believed, quinta is also the word for a farm due to a fifth of a farm's income having been paid in rent in times gone by. Interesting? Perhaps not but I enjoy linguistic links maybe more than doors. In response to the statement 'I'm going to the farm this Thursday for the fifth time', what could be more joyous than putting together this quip? À quinta, esta quinta e a quinta? To the farm, this Thursday, for the fifth [time]?

Things are beginning to fall into their natural order. I'm working a mostly regular schedule each week, keeping the money wheel going and cerebral cogs oiled. When not at work, Harry and I think about going to the farm and sometimes get there. As he won't drive the van and the last 2 kilometres of dirt track could well spell the end of his motorcycling days, our visits rely entirely on my excellent chauffeuring skills. Though Harry still populates every journey with his 'keep right, keep to the right,' a car approaches from the opposite direction, 'JESUS CHRIST MOVE TO THE RIGHT' as I attempt to position the van within the right lane without veering off the road. It's as torturing as a Greek basketball teacher I had when I was in high school who pronounced 'Luke' and 'look' as though they were homophones (I'm allowed to overuse this word as we Greeks invented homophonality) and would repeatedly drone 'Lower, Luke, look, no Luke, look! Luke, lower, Luke!' and then make us all do the sadistic squatting exercise again because Luke had not looked. Harry also responds as one might on a rollercoaster with white-knuckle clenching of the armrest each time I take a bend.

Part of the natural order also includes Harry getting stuck in to whatever he finds in front of him on the farm: slaying brambles, climbing trees, sawing, axing, pruning, moving heavy rocks around to rebuild crumbling dry stone walls, digging, ploughing and planting whilst I follow my doctor's orders and don't lift anything heavier than an iPhone. I do this to great effect, photographing and filming many of these fascinating activities by phone or drone (they look great and one day I think I might try them out). At other times you will find me reading, messaging, on a call or watching YouTube videos with as much effort as Harry puts into his farming but with fewer musculoskeletal injuries. Of course, I jest. Oftentimes I am co-opted into these much-loved chores which I execute with great aplomb. Of course, I jest. More likely I begrudgingly try to help but hinder. Use both hands! comes the oft-repeated commandment in Spanish. Who knew it was more effective to use both hands to carry out physical tasks than one?

The truth is that I find unfamiliar tasks difficult and sometimes overwhelming, especially in the physical domain. I'm more familiar and comfortable with using my mind over my matter. I am as-yet unsure how I will take to life on the farm. It would be unfair to renegade on all farming responsibilities. I tease Harry with the possibility I will retire and lie in a hammock overseeing his good work and happily eating the produce and fruits of his labour. Errands aside, the farm can be a peaceful and stimulating place. Here is an attempt to describe this.

Across uncounted hillsides, a roughly rectangular boundary has been arbitrarily determined at some point in the past now constituting the limits of our land. It is some four hundred metres long and a hundred metres wide. The rectangle lies almost on an east-west axis with a disused rocky road bisecting it into a wider eastern third and a progressively narrowing western two thirds which terminate at a stream which runs for half the year. I guess that the area of the two sections is similar but their character is not. The rocky road is pretty much the highest point forming a ridge with the abandoned farmhouse nestled at its northern edge. Along from the house there are a few eucalyptus trees, a carob tree and a precarious fig tree whose roots grab desperately around a rock with the surrounding earth all worn away. Keep walking away from the house and the chickens it houses and you will come to shanty-town styes which farmer Jorge uses for his pigs, no more than a dozen. Stop and look east and until recently you will have seen the cows and sometimes horse who wander and strip the slopes of their vegetation. There is a grove of middle-aged Holm oaks across much of one hill and in front of them a gorged out line of olive tress falling away to the south and into a neighbouring plot. These soft hills have strangely different earth with some areas muddy with fertile promise and others a sandy soil without. I know this land less well. With Jorge's twenty-something pointy-horned cows and calves penned in on this part of the farm by electric fencing––one wire describing the perimeter and acting as a deterrent to any would-be escapees––I haven't had much chance to explore it for fear of losing life or limb. As suddenly as they had appeared, the cows have now moved on and graze by the 'roundabout' where the asphalt runs out and final two kilometres of dirt track lead to the farm from the nearest village, Santa Clara. Recognising a particular herd around here is not as easy as you might think. All the cows look the same across this entire region. But Jorge has a one-horned cow which was the give-away that these were our tenants. Back on the east-side of the farm few creatures remain. Three novilhos, newbie cows, Diana, the white horse who cuts a ghostly figure on the farm, and some why-are-these-pigs-on-the-loose-Jorge? pregnant pigs and some with piglets. There are also multiple hens and cockerels who move towards and away from the farmhouse like lapping waves. I don't know if Diana has a name but this is what Harry has decided she will be called and he is dewy-eyed around her. First he suggested we take apples and carrots to befriend her and there was limited success. Now it's corn. Within moments of our arrival and his whistling and shouting 'Diana, Diana!' she trots over to where she thinks we'll meet her before finding the treat and providing the satisfying sound of crunching on dry kernels. For the time being she is more comfortable with me. She will let me approach her and rub her face a little but she'll move away if Harry gets too close. This could be explained by the fact he felt threatened by her during one of the very first visits to the farm and shooed her away with a stick.

At the time of writing the cows have all reappeared on our land... Jorge!

A bath with a ballcock provides all the water for this troop of quadrupeds. On one recent visit we pulled up in the van to find one of the gravid pigs crunching away on one of the chickens, or what was left of it. Munch munch munch without so much as a whiff of self-consciousness. Or 'nyum nyum nyum' as Harry would say. When a lady needs her protein, she needs her protein. If you walk downhill from the ridge road towards the line of olive trees and then turn right and follow this depression you get to our eastern boundary with a triangle of land just beyond containing a fig tree and several orangey-type trees huddled around the flowing water. We had a topographer visit a few weeks ago to help us work out where exactly our boundary was so we wouldn't have disputes with our neighbours in future. Part way through the grand tour with the topographer semi-complaining that the landmarks didn't match the 'cadastro' (the official map held by the municipality) Harry, Jorge and he continued to map out the farm with stakes whilst I peeled off with Cow-Owner José who mumbled lots of potentially interesting information about the farm and its surrounds. I think he said that the old road linking the Algarve to Gomes Aires (the other nearby village) ran past the farm and was hand-built. I think he said that one neighbouring farm, which includes the triangle of citrus, belongs to about fifty people (all descendants of the original owner) so chances of them ever getting their acts together and selling it approach zero. I'm more secure about what he said when I asked how old he was. He had hopped along rocks in the stream which runs along the western-most edge so daintily that I was curious to know what I might hope for at whatever age he was. The dreaded 'how old do you think I am?' question came back at me as I huffed and puffed up a hill back towards the ridge. I obfuscated and then didn't get an answer from him as he meandered off into another conversation. Eventually, just as with our hike, we ended up back where we started and he told me he had passed sixty. Wow. Not a single grey hair and running over the rocks past sixty. I'll take it but probably won't get it if I'm supine on a hammock overseeing others work.

The topographical survey was a pricey price to pay to find out that, yes the old cadastro map doesn't line up exactly with twenty-first century GPS-to-the-centimetre measurements but going with the landmarks on the ground is the only pragmatic solution otherwise we could get embroiled in all sorts of impossible legal squabbles with our neighbours. So it was kind of a waste of time and money but we got three digital maps out of it. It was the estate agency-cum-engineering company that we bought the farm through who provided the service and when we went to their offices several weeks later, the boss, Sayil, went through and explained things and then directed his colleague to give us hard copies of the maps. I couldn't help but be amused or perhaps bemused when she took the A3-sized documents I had rolled up off me and began to measure them with a ruler, place a mark and begin to fold and fold again before placing each one in a plastic A4 wallet. There was something ritual and important in the act, for her at least.

If we jump to the stream and western border with Arménio for a moment, we will be at a very different-feeling part of the farm. The lowest and wettest portion, canes had taken up residence along the final bank and up to and over the stone wall. This is the patch I explored a while back and was terrified I'd fall into a covered well. Armenio had been making moaning noises for a while about the canes and how they were starting to lie down and encroach on his olive tree's light. It was uncomfortable that he was being so insistent and interfering about it all. A mixture of wetter weather and inopportunity kept us away long enough for him to take matters into his own hands. He had decided the canes needed to come down and cleared significant patches. When we finally made it back to the farm and down the beastly bank we sank into a silent collaboration of cane-clearing with him and discovered we had an allotment! Poring over the maps with Sayil he pointed to the copy of the old cadastro map with little subplots marked out across the western-most strip of land and said: 'You have a vegetable garden here. It used to belong to various people but now it's yours.' We know! We've already cleared it and planted aubergines, corn, chickpeas, potatoes and tomatoes!

The land to the west of the central ridge is a little more confusing as several funnels of lumpy hillside tumble down before eventually reaching the stream. Initially the steeper slopes are of the sandy, rocky type before you reach what I refer to as our first well. Here a solitary mespilo tree stands guard by the frog-filled water. I call it a mespilo because that's we call this popular tree's fruit in Cyprus (the tree is actually a mespiliá). Internyetski tells me it's called a Japanese medlar or loquat in English. You learn something useless every day. The Portuguese call it a nespereira which produces nêspera and to confuse us all more, the similar-sounding níspero is the Spanish for a totally different tropical fruit that Harry knows well from 'back home'. Well, anyway, it's good to see it fruiting, though Iberian magpies are unlikely to leave any for us as they seem happy to snatch these even when unripe. Either side the land bulges up towards the northern and southern neighbours' farms (Jorge's and José's respectively). Things get a little more interesting as you continue on down and west and a relatively narrow strip of land flattens out and trees increase in density until a thicket of brambles chokes a small wooded area which veers off the left. Harry had done most of the clearing around the second well to uncover a quince tree, olive tree, fig tree and old vine. Now with the help of his glamorous new assistant––the roçadora or brush cutter, not me––he has made even more progress towards the vegetable garden. 'Don't clear all the brambles,' warns an uninvited Armenio whilst Harry sweats away hacking at the spiky fiends. 'The pigs will get through and destroy your vegetable garden.' Annoyingly, he's absolutely right. There are probably several more days of bramble-clearing before we'll know what else lurks in this impenetrable patch. Most of the drystone walls which have helped manage the flow of water on the land have been damaged by years of abandonment and neglect. One consequence is that the recent heavy rains rushed down the hill and onto the vegetable garden washing away some of the crops. Handy Harry heaved heavy rocks to build a provisional dam and divert the flow back down its original fossa which will avoid this damage in future.

Whilst we're on the matter of water there are two more mentions that are blog-worthy. The first is the rain. My aching bones from winter's chilly temperatures faded some time around Harry's birthday in mid-March and there were days of intense spring heat and sunshine. Spring has sprung, I sing sang sung. It lasted all of two days before typical British weather descended on us with grey skies, rain and cold winds. It has rained and rained and rained and rained––but I love it. This drought-ridden region needs all the water it can get though I don't know that much has been captured as most runs off into the rivers and eventually back to the Atlantic Ocean where the pluvial mischief started. Just outside Almodôvar is the relatively small barragem (dam) of Monte Clérigo. I like to take Ichiro there as he and his sphincters seem more relaxed there than in town. End of March the barragem is not only full but water gushes down its concrete overflow structure. It appears to be a source of great local attraction with people coming and going in their cars to behold this watery wonder of nature. Besides the rain has been the boring business of the bradawl and the borehole. I've not pushed Mr Borehole-man to drill as I know a very hefty price tag will come with it and I was looking to postpone the pain. My delay tactics folded when I saw several missed calls from him, called him back and was presented with: We're going to drill tomorrow. I just thought I'd let you know. I don't know why I passed up the chance to witness this grand event. Our neighbours didn't. It was a quinta (Thursday) and despite being free in the afternoon, it hadn't occurred to me to go and check on what was going on. However, the next morning was our first rain-foiled appointment with the topographer whereupon we found the drillers (Mr Borehole-man was nowhere to be seen) beaming and finishing off the job. They had a small audience of arms-folded Jorge and José who I guess had not had this much excitement for decades. You should have been here yesterday. You should have seen the jet of water that came out the ground! There's LOADS of water. The drillers packed up and left after they torched the ends of the plastic tubing and folded them down pointedly saying 'sometimes people sabotage the boreholes and throws stones in'. Neighbours, be warned! In the following days the neighbours did gently complain. 'They dug too much. They didn't need to dig so deep. A hundred and thirty six metres. My borehole's fifty metres and it's never failed me in thirty years,' bemoaned Jorge. I've not yet caught up with Mr Borehole-man to interrogate him about this. Whilst a deeper hole is likely to guarantee water for longer in this drying-out part of the world, we will pay by the metre... You can see the blue pipe of the borehole in the photo above.

An assortment of recent photos.