Alentejo In My Heart! By Jose Arrais-Velez

When most people think of Portugal, they speak first of Lisbon, the large capital of our country, and the second oldest city in all of Europe. But there is so much more!

I am Joe Arrais-Velez, and I live in Massama, Portugal, with my lovely wife Paula and our three children. My parents were both born in Alentejo province, south of Lisbon and the River Tagus, in a village very close to the Spanish border. In this prime agricultural area of Portugal, you can imagine that I grew up appreciating and enjoying the bounty of Alentejo products; goat and lamb cheese, chorizo, proscuitto, wine, olive oil, bread and many other amazing products.

When you look to Alentejo it’s a bit like Kansas. It is very flat, very hot in the summer, very cold in the winter, with long fields of  wheat but also large and beautiful groves of olive trees and cork trees. What I like about Alentejo is the fact that you always feel relaxed when you visit that province, the amplitude of the horizon gives you a feeling of peaceful easy feeling, specially in Spring and Fall, when colors literally “explode” around you.

The taste of the Alentejo products are absolutely amazing, of course.  With the rich diversity of Portugal present in such a small part of the country, Alentejo things look and taste unique and different (at least to me). And one thing that the Alentejo and its hardworking citizens are very proud of  relates to the Mediterranean diet. What the rest of the world has ‘discovered’ in the past ten years has been a part of the Alentejo for thousands of years.

The foundation of the Alentejo diet is very simple. In the South, the people don’t like very much to cook with regular oils used in most parts of the world, like canola, corn or soy oils. For them,  olive oil is always a must, almost a “religion”!!! They fry with olive oil, they put olive oil in the salads, and other dishes they make, but it could never be considered to use anything but olive oil.

But the interesting part is the high quality of the products they grow and then use, and with that you can have excellent and very tasty food. A favorite is  “Açorda” (a bread soup that uses hot water that was boilled with a slice of dried cod fish or haddock, then some olive oil, smashed garlic and cilantro. Another is “Ensopado de Borrego” (young lamb cooked in hot water with olive oil, garlic and some herbs, then the tasty water that is soaked with hard wheat bread.  “Sopa de Cação”  is shark soup, again with slices of hard wheat bread and cilantro.

Of course there is much more than food, for Alentejo is also a great place to see old walled villages, cities, monumental old churches, palaces and castles, most of them with at least 500 years old. When a Portuguese talks about walled villages or cities with the castles above them on bluffs and mountains in the Alentejo, because of the flat geography the expanse of our land can be seen from many miles away...making these walled villages like “lighthouses” in flat fields. You don’t see that in Kansas!

So when you come to Portugal, make sure to visit Lisbon, Fatima, Porto and the other famous sites. But come and soak in my dear Alentejo, as it is one of the 10 other provinces we have in Portugal...all completely different with their own “DNA”!!!