Travel to Portugal during summer

If you are looking for a great vacation with beautiful beaches, warm water, great scenery and delicious food I strongly recommend a place called Benagil, Portugal. The locals call it Algarve and whats popular about it is the cave with the hole in the ceiling. Others call it rock cave with hole. You wont miss it. The catch is that you cant enter in on foot, you need a boat. That is not a problem if you are close by, there is a bunch of boats, kayaks and paddle boards for rent. Strongly recommend it.

We rented a sailing boat outside Faro and took a couple hours trip to Benagil. The captain was sarcastic and funny. He took care of us for the whole trip. He found a private beach close to the cave, took us there with a tiny boat, placed some sun shades, grilled some chicken and fish, even brought some wine and watermelons. After a couple of hours of eating, drinking and swimming we went back to land. On the way we even saw some dolphins, but they were a bit far away. Great experience for only 50 euros a person. In Stockholm, a dinner cost that much. 

Okey, there was a bunch of restaurants in the Quarteira where we lived in. We tried japanese sushi, brasilian meats, local portugese fish and pizzas, we even went to most coffee shops and bars. Most of the places were very good, good service, decent prices, interesting layouts and best of all most people speak english. From what we seen in the area we expect the whole Portugal to be similar, which is great. Maybe someday we will come back and visit the capital Lisbon instead. 

What I found unique in Portugal is a store called Cork. You know the top of the wine bottle? Exacly, apperently they can make anything from cork! Everything from purses to post cards, cork table mats, hats, jewelry, bags, wallets, shoes, belts, key chains and much, much more! I could not resist myself and I bought a cork hat and a belt. My wife bough a purse and some other small things. The prices were ok too. Just dont ever buy a rip offs from china. Inside there is bunch of plastics and other useless stuff. The originals are amazing! You can bend them, put water on them, and they feel good in your hand. This is how it looks like:

The question I asked myself, is a cork durable? The answer is yes, very durable. Just as durable as leather. The cork products are treated with a protective coat for strength. Fun fact is that around 70% of world cork has come from Portugal. Cork is a portuguese local souvenir. Portugal has made perfected processes of growing, extracting and converting cork to fine products. 

What I noticed in Portugal is that most of buildings have Securitas signs on the walls. It is a safety company that keeps the bad guys away. Securitas is a Swedish company and it amazes me how huge the company is. The company has over 150 000 clients and has operations in 47 markets worldwide. Lately, the stock crashed to new lows, the P/E is now 10 compared to historical 17. The facts are taken from a page called börsdata.se

P/E 17 times the expected profit of 9 SEK for 2022 gives us a normal share price of 154 SEK. Now you can buy Securitas under 100 SEK which is insane. I bought more shares even if its painful to see the shares drop in value. It will go up one day. CEO bought for 1 million SEK on 18th of May. Why shouldnt I? On 16th of June CEO bought another pile of shares for 1,3 million SEK. 

Back to Portugal, the whole trip for a week costed us two a little bit above 1 000 euros which is a really normal price. Compared to Sweden the prices in Portugal are a little bit lower on food, transportation and activities. Regarding Covid I did not noticed much, public transport had a mandatory masks, otherwise it was free to do whatever. I had a great time and I would like to go back there again someday. Maybe even live there when I am older, will see how life turns out to be. I am still young.

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