Exploring the lungs of Europe

 Having hundreds of miles of forest on the doorstep provides us with great walking opportunities, especially since it is a national park and has lots of tracks to enable access by vehicles to collect the  pine resin for use in making traditional paints,

Portugal has been in lockdown since 15th January but we are allowed to go for walks (though the town beach and esplanade and all the parks are out of bounds) The only disadvantage of the vast forest is that pine forests do lack variety in terms of scenery,

Still, it is good to get out and about and at the moment there is a ;ot of yellow flowering with bermudan buttercups, gorse  and mimosa in full bloom.

The dunes and woodland fringes  add orange to the landscape with aloe vera and montbretia

We have also been looking at the wealth of fungi that abound at the moment.