Walking through Portugal's Alentejo

Robin McKelvie wanders through the remotest bit of Portugal's empty Alentejo region.

If Portugal was once known as the 'Poor Man of Europe' then the Alentejo must have been his even poorer long forgotten uncle. This sleepy anachronism borders on the catatonic as I discovered walking from the vast emptiness of the Barragem de Santa Clara reservoir through the vast emptiness of the Baixa Alentejo hills to the vast emptiness of the Alentejo's sweeping beach strewn coast.

The Alentejo simply means 'land beyond the River Tejo' and the Baixa is the 'lower' part of this region. Sprawling its tentacles south of Lisbon towards the Algarve, the Alentjeo swallows up a third of the Portuguese mainland, but is home to less than 10% of its population.

My starting point was the Barragem de Santa Clara, a reservoir that was one attempt to kick-start this rural backwater into the twenty-first century. I found that for now the twentieth century, let alone the twenty-first, is going to have to wait as in the Alentejo things take time. Lots of it. Judging by the post-apocalyptic empty roads, forgotten trails, abandoned farmhouses and creaking ghostly windmills that peppered my 100km hike the reservoir is the latest in a long line of economic stimulus failures. In a week I saw far more goats than people and I saw precious few of those.

This bereft but unassumingly striking land and its trails are perfect for that sort of trance-inducing walking that frees the mind and soul. Wide and earthy you don't even really have to watch your footing as you idle along the trails under bleached blue skies across parched scrub that is as African as it is European. This is Europe's big sky country. Rolling hills come and go and all appears dead on the ground, but the air is alive with one of the most eclectic bird populations in Europe.

Frank McCormick, a wonderful eccentric (for the Alentejo read 'perfectly normal') is a birder who now runs Quinta do Barranco da Estrada, where I spent my first night overlooking the reservoir. He filled me in on the myriad species: "We have everything here on the migration routes, from the short-toed larks and subalpine warblers through to various eagles and even the gigantic great bustard." Quite a cast list for a terrain that to my virginal eye was almost completely unforgiving and hostile.

Frank is as concerned about the human frailties of the region as its birdlife. Portugal boasts a third of the world's cork oak trees and cork production is a major employer in the Alentejo. The new trend for plastic or metal stoppers has dealt the sort of economic blow that the Alentejo has been taking for centuries and can ill afford. Frank summed up the importance of cork and the significance of its current decline, using the words of a local saying that had a melancholy tinged with an unmistakable sense of Portuguese fado: "The vines were planted by me, the olive trees by my parents, but the cork, that comes from my ancestors."

Heading west with Frank's words echoing in the Doldrums-esque silence I strolled through acre after acre of cork oak marvelling at the dedication behind having to wait forty three years to harvest the first cork from a new tree. It does produce two harvests before then, but they are not of the required quality, something that seems to have been forgotten in the 1990s when global wine production went through the roof and demand meant substandard corks going out, accelerating the hallowed cork's replacement still further.

The plains and hills I wandered through were also laced with eucalyptus trees, a less useful crop in a land conspicuously devoid of koala bears. After a light dusting of rain, and light dustings of rain are about all you get in this arid wildscape, the sense heightening, sharp eucalyptus scent made me feel like I was padding through a seriously organic health spa. This one lacked a masseuse, but was no less relaxing as I enjoyed picnics with no sound bar my increasingly relaxed breathing and views uninterrupted by neither road nor power line.

I broke the week's walking staying at two other wonderfully eccentric quintas. You don't need to be a little mad to live and work in the Alentejo, but it seems to help. At Corte Nova da Preguica the owner, Ze Falcao, who used to run his own restaurant in Lisbon, bashes guests around in his clapped out Merc before conjuring up thrilling meals that burst with the Alentejo's fresh and bold flavours. Fish soups as thrilling as a dip in the Alentejo's Atlantic surf, sliced meats as earthy as that baked red land and rounds of goats cheese melted intoxicatingly with honey oozed from his laidback kitchen. As Ze looked like a rugged cross between Jose Mourinho and a wild living rock star that would give the more nefarious of the Rolling Stones a run for their money I even forgave him when he filled his diesel with petrol after one particularly exuberant meal.

As the coast approached I ambled down from the Serra do Cercal, mere foothills really by European or even Portuguese standards, but charming in their tree shrouded stillness, to stay at Tres Marias with perhaps the least oddball of my three hosts. That is saying something when it appears Balthazar Trueb has ditched two wives in favour of a pet ostrich. His remote steading, which once housed an entire flock of the unlikely birds, used to thrive by exporting ostrich meat all over Europe. Balthazar still bemoans the Foot and Mouth outbreak that decimated his business and turned him into another - by now all too familiar - Alentejo hard luck story.

Breaking out from the Tres Marias along the coast I pondered what Balthazar had told me about the Alentejo's beaches being a match for the Algarve. With their sweeping white sands, towering dunes and rugged cliffs they are. But the Alentejo also offers something that its tourist clogged southern sibling can only look fondly back on with a sense of fado. The chance to ramble free in deserted hills, across plains where birds are the only company and the opportunity to become enmeshed in the oddball lives of the characters who have found Portugal's old forgotten uncle the ideal relative.