This is Faro in Portugal. I've just returned from a short break there and I was very excited by it's similarity to the Thames Estuary, in terms of its marsh and site for birds. They even have flamingoes there in the winter months which has a link to the Thames as there were rumoured to be a colony of flamingoes there in the 1980's who had escaped from a zoo in Essex. I know the weather is slightly different and the lagoon is fed by the Atlantic sea but the terrain reminded me so much of the Thames Estuary. Faro itself is an interesting place, a small city or large town? It has an historic walled centre and as you venture further from that, the buildings become more modern. When we flew into Faro, we had missed the bus and so my husband Pete decided we could walk the 2 miles. It was quite an interesting walk, rather like an Iain Sinclair novel because we ended up for most of it, walking down this busy highway. I find it fascinating what you see in the gutters of the roads; numerous plastic bottles of course (universal tokens of convenience), plants, old tyres and scraps of tyres, discarded mobile phones, chicken bones.
Houses that once must have been quite pleasant were suddenly abutted right up against the extended road system into Faro. They still retained the architectural riches of the past, on friezes and windows but were misplaced and brutally ignored in this urban development that we were part of in our tourist seeking mode.
Faro had one or two nice artist spaces so I contemplated the idea of bringing the estuary dialogue project to Faro. Any Portuguese artists out there who would like to collaborate on the collaboration?
