Alcacer do Sal - ordinary, soulful, magnificent.

We had lunch in Alcacer do Sal last year. This sounds more stylish than it really was, more accurately, we had some bread and cheese in the car park by the river en-route from Sines to Lisbon. It was a pretty spot. 'We might come back here,' we conjectured. So we have.

The place attracts motorhomes - bees to the proverbial honeypot. This has nothing to do with the place's charms, it's to do with the practicalities of the itinerant life. The town is placed conveniently just off the A2 motorway equidistant from the Spanish border near Badejoz and the Algarve, a perfectly placed stop off. There are plenty of free or inexpensive places to stay, the car park across the river from the town, or up the hill in a free aire outside the Municipal campsite. The site itself is cheap, a little rustic and somewhat mossie infested. However it's next to a Lidl and an Intermarché with an outdoor laundrette and a motorhome service point in the carpark. So even if the town was dominated by a disused cement works and famous throughout Iberia for the manufacture of chicken manure it would still be packed with mohos. As it happens the place is rather lovely in an ordinary kind of way.

The weather has become changeable over the past few days. The unexpected showers are unwelcome but the bubbling cloudscapes spectacular. We stood on a footbridge watching thunderheads drift across the mirror-still river. Upstream they were huge - meringue shaped domes; downstream, in the low late afternoon sun, light streamed through them in creating veils of silver, gold and slate grey. 

'Its very soulful here,' I remarked, then immediately wondered what exactly I meant by the phrase. Something to do with quietude, I think, a sublime peace. Also the sense of time unfolding gradually, the languid river and slow drifting clouds all creating the illusion of life lived at a slower pace.

Later on as the the light faded, Gill was cooking with the the kitchen window open. 'You should get out there with the camera,' she exclaimed, "the sky is bright pink". I grabbed the Canon and hurried towards the footbridge. An incandescent sunset unfolded downstream - a magnificent sight.