A sombre stroll to Gala

I guess the notices in the camp site reception should have alerted us to the fact that the local seaside village of Gala was not an up and coming St Tropez. The first poster advised that guests should not leave anything outdoors due to the 'nature' of the local environment. I don't think they meant that the resident magpies were large, viscous and given to thievery. The second notice was designed to protect the management from the actions of people who chose to ignore the first. It advised that Orbitur asserted that the liabilities for loss and damage to guest's property lay not with the company, but with the perpetrators of the acts, advising the victims to seek redress from the said criminals through the usual legal channels, and if the actions were found to be the work of minors, to take the matter up with their parents and guardians. Perhaps Gala should be twinned with New Brighton.

We needed bread for lunch, so we risked life and limb by walking down the kilometer long road to the village. It was wide, but had no pavement, so enabled the passing traffic to play the second most popular sport in Portugal - scare the bejesus out of pedestrians - I think the game is called Brithop.

Anyhow, we arrived in Gala to find it shut for lunch. It's really an industrial suburb of Figueira da Foz and a pretty unprepossessing one at that. It has a seafront of sorts, but it was being blasted by an Atlantic gale when we tried to walk along it. Next to this is the fisherman's quarter in a state of dilapidation, populated by out of work men accompanied by unleashed evil looking bull mastiffs trotting along beside them; ancient women sat outside their front doors staring into space, an air of hopelessness and resignation pervaded the place. It was sad to see. This can't be simply the result of the current austerity, but the outcome of generations of impoverishment.

So what's with the Neopolitan ice-cream paving....

This shack had been painted-up, but around the corner families were living in un-painted ones, which were falling to bits.

So, give up on the second rate public statuary - find people jobs!

Eventually we found the main street, it had some interesting tile fronted houses, 1930s I guess.. Most were boarded up, some were falling down. We found an open bread shop, the bread only cost 25 cents.

The village centre was full of old houses for sale, this one was intact, most were ruins.

How will Portugal ever extricate itself from the current predicament? It does feel like a country that has simply run out of money, without the means to invest in the future. The German inspired austerity drive seems designed to entrench the problem not ameliorate it. We talked about this as we walked back towards the campsite through an area of public housing, a few rows of utilitarian concrete low-rise flats in a litter strewn wasteland.

Grey, soul-less public housing projects are not the answer - believe me, I grew up on one 1000 miles north of here.

The last time I visited anywhere quite so god forsaken was an estate on the edge of the Mansfield in Nottinghamshire.