Portugal’s “Melancholy Beauty”
Travel Blog • Jim Benning • 04.26.04 | 8:27 PM ET
The South Florida Sun-Sentinel Travel section yesterday featured a terrific story by Jason Wilson, the editor of Hougton Mifflin’s annual Best American Travel Writing anthology. Wilson wrote about the Alentejo region of Portugal, where cork trees grow and drunk bullfighters gather in bars to watch Spanish bullfights. “Beginning a little more than an hour east of Lisbon, most tourists overlook the plains as they pass through on their way to the Speedos-discos-and-boozy-sunburned-Brits debauchery of the Algarve beaches,” Wilson writes. “By contrast, the Alentejo, the poorest, most sparsely populated part of Portugal, is a beautiful, melancholy place with blistering, sun-baked summers and chilly winters, vineyards and olive groves, castle ruins and hill towns. It’s similar to how I imagine some parts of Tuscany must have been 20 years ago, before the lip-smacking Anglo-American joie de vivre types took over.”
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Jim Benning is the editor and co-founder of World Hum.
