Portugal

I'm just back from 6 days of holiday in Portugal. Together with Marieke I went to Paul in Estoril. Kind of reunion with the well established traditions of drinking wine and whiskey, good food and nice stories. It was great to see Paul again, the last big trip together is already 5 years ago - summiting Mount McKinley. We are already making plans again but currently the Pauls focus is more on his family and home, but I'm waiting for the trips in the future.

It was pretty warm - 15-20 degrees, nice warm sun and sometimes rain. We visited two really cool climbing spots. The first one is located close to Estoril and is called Guia. Cool limestone routes, it is well bolted and you climb close to the sea. The area is pretty impressive and the nice thing is that easy routes in the lower grades are close to the harder routes.



The second area is Rocha da Pena in the south of Portugal, about 40 minutes drive from Faro. The limestone cliffs get sun early in the morning and are easy accessible by car, followed by a nice hike of maybe 15 minutes. The limestone is solid and sharp and the routes are well bolted as well.



These rock climbing days are the first rock days in 2013 and I must say: good start of the season. I climbed a few 6c's onsight, which is pretty good for my climbing level.

If you are looking for a nice spot of climbing in the south of Europe I really can recommend Portugal. A nice topo is this one: http://www.climb-europe.com/RockClimbingShop/Portugal-Onsight-Rock-Climbing-Guidebook.html

Ryanair offers good tickets. 

But there is one thing we learned and I want to warn you: our complete climbing gear was stolen out of our rental car at the very first day at the cliffs in Guia. The packs were not visible from the outside and after some research on the www we suppose that we were not the only climbers who have been visited... The rock climbing season is just starting, but especially in the south of Europe there are a lot of people with no job, no money and no future. The economic crisis is for most us something we know from TV, travelling in the south we can learn a lot from people who lost everything... But please be careful with your gear!!!