This was the one day that we had planned a bunch in advance for (mostly credit to Logan). We started the day by packing up everything, grabbing some pastries for the road, and then driving to Peniche (a small town on the coast).
Off the coast of Peniche is Berlengas Nature Reserve, and we had tickets to board the ferry which took us to the island reserve (~35 minutes). Upon arriving at the island, we were given instructions to meet for the sea cave tour in ~30 minutes, but we were a bit confused as to where we were actually supposed to meet (we were told something along the lines of “my colleague will meet you and give more instructions,” and then there wasn’t actually anyone else). We figured we probably were supposed to hike up the one main path until we got to some other loading place, and we made it all the way to the highest point on the trail before we decided that we should probably just head back to where we deboarded the ferry (we were moving quickly and realized that we wouldn’t make it to any other water in less than 30 minutes).
This ultimately was the correct decision, as we boarded a boat that showed up shortly after we re-arrived, and then we got to see some sea caves. The caves themselves weren’t super crazy, but it was interesting to learn some of the history behind what purpose each of the various small bays/caves had served historically.
When the boat tour ended, we were dropped off near Fortress of St. John the Baptist (a different part of the island). The fun tidbit was that the island (+ the fort) were captured by Spain at some point (not really for any strategic reason), and the Spanish troops took some cannons as proof back to the king. However, they left the island abandoned otherwise, so Portugal just took it back over 🤡.
From the fortress, we then hiked up to the top of the island (which was slow since we were part of a tour group), and when we got to the highest point we realized that it was where we had already walked to earlier in the day (so we had done about half of the hike across the island backwards). Overall this was fun, and we made it back down for the ferry to pick us up (Jack and Brad spent some time at the beach, while Benton and Logan did a small hiking loop on a different part of the island).
We took the ferry back, and then we had about an hour and a half before our surf lesson. A number of strange things during lunch:
A lot of restaurants didn’t seem to be open, despite their hours on the door suggesting they should be open.
When we did find a restaurant that was open, they told us that only the 3 pasta dishes were available (something like “chef cannot…” in semi broken English), so we ended up all eating pasta (and we again attributed this to us eating later/not knowing the normal schedule).
Logan and Benton went to the bathroom, and could not figure out where the lightswitch was, ultimately resorting to using their phone flashlights.
We had to pay with cash, even though the tap-to-pay and credit card logos were on the doors of the restaurant. By this point, we thought something weird was up, but we continued on with our day (and we figured our phone signal was just really bad since things would load occasionally but really slowly).
Finally, when we arrived at our surf lesson, we were informed that the internet and power had been out all day since just after noon (see the 2025 Iberian Peninsula Blackout). This explained all of the other strangeness with lunch + our lack of internet, but fortunately, we were going surfing, where internet didn’t matter at all.
Surfing was super fun: Logan caught a couple waves, Jack and Benton caught quite a few, and everyone took at least a few funny falls. We were all pretty exhausted by the end of surfing, at which point it was time to drive on to Nazaré (a town known for its huge waves during the winter).
Unfortunately, getting to and checking into our Airbnb was difficult for a couple of reasons. For one, since we didn’t really have any internet, we had to navigate to Nazaré with signs/some high level saved Google maps. This wasn’t too bad since eventually we did get some directions to load, but once we arrived near the Airbnb, getting in was hard because we had received a lot of emails from Airbnb of the form “Some caption of a photo: Image received,” with instructions for how to check in, but we weren’t able to load any of the photos. After quite a bit of back and forth + using some scavenger hunt skills, we did manage to get into the Airbnb, take some lukewarm showers (still some hot water left over from earlier in the day), and then head back out to find food.
We quickly discovered that there wasn’t really any food open except for one halal place called NAZARÉ KEBAB PIZZA serving up shawarma, so naturally there was a pretty long line outside. After standing in line for about an hour, we started to lose hope that we would be getting food since the last of the meat was being used up, but then one of the workers arrived with a freshly unwrapped set of meat to start cooking. There were two Americans in the line behind us who had nearly the same itinerary as us for their Portugal trip, so they were also really just hoping to get some dinner that night.
Eventually, it was our turn to order, and we ordered some drinks with the standard item that they were serving. Then we paid (in cash), and while we were waiting for our food, the lights came back on 😀.
We ate on the beach, walked home, and slept around 11:30pm, pretty content knowing that we would have easy access to food and warm showers in the morning.
