Lagos, Portugal!

This past weekend a group of my friends and I visited Lagos, Portugal which was about a 3 hour ride from Seville. The ride was really pretty and it was cool to see more rural parts of spain and the millions of olive trees which were something that I thought were only in Italy. We traveled with a tourist company out of Seville that does trips to Lagos and other places around Spain for students who are studying abroad. We had 3 tour guides who were really enthusiastic and one actually grew up in Lagos so he knew all of the good places to go. One of the most interesting things about Lagos was that the natives hated if we tried to speak Spanish with them, they would much rather we just speak English. Most of the people working at the hotel and other places we went were all British and we found that most of the other tourists were from England as well. It was nice to take a break from speaking Spanish, but even only spending 2 days away from speaking Spanish it has been hard to go back to speaking it all of the time!

The first night our guides took us to these 2 different places that looked out over the ocean to see the sun set. They were so beautiful and one of them was called "the end of the world" because in the early days explorers actually documented the lookout as the end of the world because it is literally just a cliff that drops off and you can't see anything else beyond it. I was definitely glad that we were with the guides for that because we never would have been able to get to see the sunset on our own. After sightseeing we headed back to the town center for dinner. Lagos is a pretty small city- definitely much smaller than Seville and it was the off season so there were not that many people there. Apparently it gets very crowded during the summer though. The Portugese claim that they make the best Sangria and I will have to admit, I think that I agree with them! On Friday night the guides showed us a really good restaurant that had great Sangria. They also had huge salads which was something that we all were suprised to find that we had missed!

Me, Joey and Alexis in front of "the end of the world"

The next day we were supposed to go on a cruise around the coast of Lagos and go on a smaller boat tour of the grados. However, the waves were too big so we couldn't go which was a little dissapointing. The tour guides made up for it though and took us to a place where we were able to walk down stairs on the side of the cliff (which was actually kind of scary because they were so steep) and go down close to the grados that we would have seen on the boat tour. After, we went to a really nice beach to spend the rest of the day. We were all taken suprise at first to see that it was topless beach, but we were definitely getting the european experience!

The grados

After the day at the beach we returned to the hotel to shower and get ready for the night. That night there was the big championship soccer game of Manchester United vs. Barcelona. One of our tour guides was from England and a HUGE soccer fan and his brother works at a bar in Lagos where many British people were watching the game. He took our group there at it was really fun to watch the game because they were all so in to it and went crazy when England scored a goal. Although Barcelona ended up winning it was really fun to be able to watch it although I felt like I was in England, not Lagos! After the game we went to another local place to get dinner (delicious salads again!). After dinner we explored the town center a little bit but were definitely ahead of all of the crowds. It is interesting how nightlife in Europe doesn't start until so late. Most of the clubs don't even open until 2 or 3 am... and after the whole day in the sun, none of us were able to stay up that late!

The next day we went to another beach next to our hotel. It was really beautiful because it was enclosed by huge cliffs and there were all of these secret beaches that you could find if you climbed up over small rocks. The water was really clear and pretty warm too. We spent the whole day at the beach and drove back to Seville in the late afternoon. It was  a very relaxing weekend but we were glad to be back in Seville! Also, we didn't have any class on Monday because it is a holiday in Seville, el dia de San Sebastian!

The beach next to our hotel