Popping over to Portugal

It may be because I’m from an island race that I still find it a bit of a thrill to nip across to another country for lunch. Not so easy when you don’t have a land border.

Now, I naturally don’t mean doing a Rupert Murdoch or a Bill Gates, and popping to, say, Rome from, say, Berlin, by private jet or anything like that. We’re on holiday in Extremadura in far western Spain which took us to Badajoz for a night. Take a wrong turning there, and you might well find yourself in Portugal before you know it. Driving to the little town of Elvas took under half an hour.

The first thing I enjoyed about the excursion was that we only became aware that we’d crossed the border when we saw the ‘Welcome to Portugal’ sign (or ‘Bem-vindo a Portugal’, since they persist in speaking a foreign language there). 

I never entirely lose the pleasure of seeing international borders becoming porous. And, let me assure you, this was a border that took itself seriously. Elvas itself makes it clear, in its heavy walls with projecting bastions and defensive towers, to say nothing of its several outlying fortresses. That was all to dissuade nearby Spain ever being tempted to do a Putin to the Portuguese.

Elvas Castle: impressive but above all defensive

It’s all the more uplifting, as a result, to find this particular border has become little more than an imaginary line in the soil. One wall down out of so many in the world is, it seems to me, a small step in the right direction. It’s only a pity that so many people, particularly in the US and Britain, seem keen these days on building such walls up again rather than helping demolish them.

Elvas, by the way, provides poignant testimony of how sad that is. It has a British cemetery. In it are buried or commemorated British soldiers who fought alongside their Spanish and Portuguese allies in the Peninsular War, against French troops that were occupying Spain in Napoleon’s days. A reminder that Britain once understood that it was sometimes in its own interests to help out its continental neighbours.

Memorial plaque in the Elvas British cemetery

Back to the other thing I liked about our visit to Elvas. That was to do with the meal. I very much hope that this doesn’t offend any of my Spanish friends, since Danielle and I both love our new adoptive home. But I have to admit that there are a couple of customs in Spain that leave me a little less than comfortable, and Portugal is a country in which we don’t encounter them.

The first involves the categorisation of tuna as a vegetable. Most countries, of course, view it as a fish. In Spain, however, no mixed salad can possibly be complete without tuna on top of it. Why, back in Spain, when we asked for a mixed salad without tuna, what we got was something delicious but, inevitably, crowned with tuna despite the chef’s assurances that it wouldn’t be. 

“Salad without tuna?” they seem to say in Spain, “why, that’s like a beach without the sun. It’s positively heretical, like communion without a wafer.”

What do you mean, no tuna?
That wouldn’t be a salad

What’s more, over this trip, we’ve come across a number of Spanish restaurants which have the irritating habit of not only serving salad without any kind of dressing, but without even offering us salt, vinegar and olive oil. As for them and they bring them, sometimes with bad grace. As for pepper, “what, on a salad?” they seem to say, “that’s like asking for a sunshade in a swimming pool”.

So you can imagine our delight when, even before serving us the salad, the Portuguese waiter provided us with two bottles, one of vinegar and one of olive oil, accompanied by a shaker of salt and, more astonishing still, another of pepper.

Ah, that’s what makes it such a pleasure to go abroad for lunch. However briefly, you get to enjoy another culture. Not, though, I hasten to stress, that it was anything but a pleasure to return to the Spanish side of the frontier.

After all, we really do love our adoptive home in Spain. Even the strange idiosyncrasies it sometimes displays.