PEOPLE Hank & Carina

THEN OLHÃO FOUND US...

... and we weren't even looking! Hank and Carina's story of how they came to live in and love Olhão

Welcome to our monthly column celebrating Olhão. After exploring Portugal top to bottom from Braga to Tavira enjoying so many coastal and inland locations in our RV, we decided Olhão was the place to buy our home to celebrate our “golden years”. Olhão was not on our radar at first. In fact, the discovery of Eastern Algarve was a pleasant surprise with the scale of development so much less than areas to the west. A chance winter rental introduced us to Olhão, a place we quickly found attractive for many reasons. “Walkability” is, above all, a main highlight and each month we will introduce you to places only steps away from our front door. We hope you will enjoy our column!

THIS FISH STORY HAS LEGS…. AND ARMS? :-)

Looking at the far right side of the main photo, you’ll notice part of the local marina where boats rest, anchors up, waiting for the next journey. Being on the water here is much of what Olhão is all about. The building on the left side of the photo presents another anchor that secures this place, the Olhão Mercado seafood market building. Together with its twin outlet to the east where fresh veggies, fruit, meats and cheeses are offered, these structures serve local daily shoppers, delivering a friendly person to person experience worth returning for! Olhão boasts the largest fishing port in the Algarve and the Mercado, built in 1915 and renovated in 1997, it is the Algarve’s largest and most interesting fresh fish market. Long before the first stirrings of tourism and hotels and so many great restaurants here, seafood was the core income and what “Olhanenses” served at home. Simple entries like “Xarem” which combined corn flour with varieties of the local catch sustained the local citizens here. Today several local places offer that dish on their menus. Our first Google Earth investigation of Olhão, once we secured our place to stay here last winter, suggested we could look forward to a short walk to the Olhão Mercado to purchase and bring home ingredients for our daily dinner. So true! Fresh tuna has been a favourite and at about half the cost as in the US or Sweden. I’ve discovered octopus at a local restaurant (read on), but have yet to bring one home to cook. I sure know where to find one when I’m ready!

ABOVE: Part of the Mogno crew. Isabel Duarte – Kitchen, Mariana Lourenco - Waitress, Luis Nunes - Head Waiter, Andre Vieira - Kitchen

With so much variety, Carina and I have a lot to learn about how to prepare and cook these edible creatures we’ve never seen before! For the largest selection, go there on a Saturday morning, although it gets busy with shoppers arriving from all over the region. The Mercado is closed on Sunday. Respect the language and bring a translator app on your phone! Cash is king here.

MOGNO

While the Olhão Mercado has clearly been well established for many years, Mogno, located west of the Mercado directly across from the marina access gate and next door to El Torino, is only one of those things. The risk involved in opening a restaurant from scratch is really high at the best of times. Joseph Viegas opened Mogno on June 24th, 2020. This was perhaps the unluckiest day to open a restaurant in recorded history. The virus I will no longer name was just getting started. Everything was closing. You remember the rest. Yet in spite of all this, Mogno is now very well established, like Monday lunch every seat is taken. I think I know why. It is more than the menu offering innovative healthy entries. It’s the staff. They offer something that we old folks recognize with envy, youth! The main secret ingredient delivering success, based on my experience there, is joy. Mogno is a fun place served by joyful young staff and those innovative healthy entries fly out the door and, in his words to me the other day, Joseph is amazed. Mogno offers seating both indoors and out, with the patio area delivering the almost always pleasant weather and on Sundays, live music. In this shot, Fernando Daniel delivers his guitar and voice on a recent weekend. He and other local musicians entertain more days and nights each week as the warm weather and visiting crowds arrive for the high season. We discovered Mogno during that lowest of low seasons, last winter! It was our first dinner out in Olhão. Combined with sweet potato mash, the flavour and texture of my first octopus (polvo), dinner was more than I was expecting. Mogno became an instant favourite!

For our full introduction, see our first column online in the December 2021 issue. (https://www.eastalgarvemag.com/) Fine Print – Questions or Comments? Write to us at hankryan2003@yahoo.com We choose to focus on businesses here in Olhão where we have actually been customers first. Any future advertising from these businesses that supports Eastern Algarve Magazine is purely coincidental :-) Here is the answer to the arms and legs question. Experts say an octopus has six “arms” and two “legs”. Now you know!