WWOOFing in Portugal

After having had a wonderful WWOOFing experience in Spain, we did another round of WWOOFing at a place called Mexilhoeira Grande near Lagos in the south of Portugal. We wanted to be here for two weeks but we stayed only one. This was a 6 hectare farm with a large greenhouse where they grew a lot of tropical plants. The host was Diogo who singlehandedly developed a large farm on this land over the past 5 years. There was also a 100 year old house that he was repairing to live in. The greenhouse had plants ranging from beans, aubergine, basil, okra, bitter guard, moringa, papaya, banana, onions, herbs, and a lot of other plants. The rest of the farm outside the greenhouse, which occupied most of the land, had thousands of orange trees, many pomegranate, and avocado trees.

The host was nice that he gave us a separate room in a large shipping container that was turned into a house. The container had a warm shower, a toilet, and another shared room which had four beds. There was a large shed outside the container where they had a kitchen and a living room where we cooked our meals from the produce of the farm and relaxed after our work. As the house was on a very high ground, we had views of the sea from the living area which was beautiful. There were also many old cars, a freezer, and many vans that were turned into rooms that were used by other WWOOFers to sleep during the night. We worked starting at 7:30am until around 1:30pm with some breaks in between. We got to watch sunrises almost every day. Nora was with us during the entire time, sometimes on our back/front in the carrier and other times on the floor playing with soil and stuff that was lying around her. She really enjoyed her time surrounded by nature.

Our work during the week involved cleaning the beans plants of insects, planting new onions and carrot plants, making pesto from freshly harvested basil, harvesting different types of fruits and vegetables for the weekly market, and helping with the construction of the stone house.

Even though we spent just a week here, we learnt a lot about different kinds of trees, their care, how to start new vegetable plants, how and when to harvest vegetables and fruits, and a little bit about stone construction.

We are looking forward to doing more WWOOFing during our travels and learning more about our food source.