Off-grid and Ignorant in Portugal Off-Grid in Portugal

In the end they left with a whimper rather than a bang.
Almost un-noticed, things on the building site gradually started disappearing until suddenly there was nothing left – except for a large pile of building rubbish and some unfinished digging work.
We’d agreed to pay for some of Justo’s digger time by the hour, and just as I was stressing about which work we needed him to do in what order he started loading it on the back of the truck.
“Broken” he shrugged and headed off to the mechanic.
He came back with an empty truck and as if by magic the last builders’ cabin disappeared. We haven’t seen them since.
I suppose that’s when we realised it was up to us now, and that all the things that still needed to be done...need to be done by us.
And there’s quite a long list.
The gradual departure of the builders passed us by because we were just so busy.
Cleaning the land with a strimmer within 50m of every building needed to be done by the end of May, and having prioritised other things I found myself facing quite an uphill (and downhill, and uphill, and downhill again) task.
With huge thanks to volunteer helpers John Rourke and Hugh Jennings who took some good chunks out of the work, I have been rising at dawn to get out on the land before the heat really hits.
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(Although I wonder if there’s a connection between John’s Scottish roots and the propensity of remaining thistles? I do hope you’re recovering well John!).
Summer has arrived and strimming after 11am quickly becomes a very energy-sapping endeavour when there’s so much else to do after the work out.
Weed-whacking might be a great weight-loss programme, but it steals my thinking and writing time.
This is the longest I’ve left between delivering despatches from Vale das Estrelas since I began, and the early morning exercise along with the bi-weekly podcast episodes have nipped my creativity.
By the way, if you haven’t started listening to the podcast yet please go over to our other Substack page – or search on Spotify or Apple Podcasts for Ana & Al’s Big Portuguese Wine Adventure. We’re up to Episode 5 already!
Help us, part 1…
The first way you can help us is to rate the podcast and leave us a review to get the algorithm working for us…and getting more people listening.
The other big deadline was saving the lives of our 250 olive trees, scattered citrus and newly planted rosemary and lavender bushes in front of the new houses.
They were all starting to seriously sag and even though we started the process of replacing a broken irrigation pump early it was a close call.
We decided to install a submersible pump in the lake to provide all the irrigation water for now – until we have a full house at the lodge and the waste treatment plant starts providing us with ample nutritious agua.
The brilliant Cristiano and his brother Eduardo built an island out of an old pallet and four second-hand blue barrels bought for the occasion, but sadly the island sank and we had to switch it for a bright orange buoy.
The guys laid out the 300m of pipes in the blink of an eye, because they are experts in what is an undervalued, but hugely valuable skill.
Then the thief of time became the drippers.
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You can buy ready-to-install systems with a connector to the main pipe, a tube and then a spiked dripper which you push into the soil near the tree or plant to deliver water directly to the roots.
My decision to buy the constituent parts rather than the whole thing, and then put them together ourselves was meant to be time saving not money saving, but that couldn’t have been further from the truth.
It took us hours and at the cost of blisters and holes in our fingers which have still not recovered.
And then after Ana connected them all, they di

“So when do you open?” is a common question as everything on our hillside starts to look a little more finished.
“Last Saturday” is my current response – because that was the original plan.
Great friends of ours from our Bangkok days...and their friends...had booked last year to come and stay when the finish date on the building contract was optimistically set for the end of February.
“Yes, this February,” was my common response (often to the builders) while we prepared for a group of 28 people – half of them children, but we felt that even if it slipped a month or two we’d be all set by May.
It was a very generous offer to help us with a soft opening – to give us the practical experience of running a retreat for a large group with varying demands – safe in the knowledge they are friends and would understand...and give great feedback.
As the year began, and the combination of heavy rain delaying the construction and the growing realisation that we are not super-human led us to suggest they book the larger and more established Pé no Monte hotel nearby.
We are so pleased they did.
Their slimmed down early-arrival group of 20 came over to see us for a tour, a wine tasting and a sardine supper.
The ratio was the same: ten adults to ten children.
Obviously diggers make great climbing frames, rock dust is perfect for sandcastles and “don’t go close to the precipice by the pool” translates into child as “we must go over there.”
The electricity is now connected to all the buildings and the spaghetti water system is working – including to the toilets and showers – but the sinks aren’t quite there to help the water to its final destination.
All but one of the outside doors and windows are now in, the interior doors are ready to hang and the metal safety railings for the mezzanines will go in this week (they could have plunged off those precipices too).
The wine tasting went well, the sardines feast was saved by our friend Adam Cooper’s quick intervention and we ended the day having learned a lot of lessons about hospitality...and health & safety.
Our wonderful daughter Oda has been staying with us – en route to managing the emerging American indie rock artist Taylor Sackson for her first UK tour.
Check out the dates and if you’re local, drop in and show some support for Oda and Taylor (she’s got an amazing voice).
Oda knew it was going to be a busy time in the Valley of the Stars, but none of us anticipated just how manic the last couple of weeks were going to be – it was a proper case of spinning plates while juggling (or a combination of the two).
She arrived in the middle of our filling-the-pool water crisis which I wrote about last time, a task made much more difficult by a broken borehole.
After trying everything he could first, the ever impressive Cristiano and his brother Eduardo set about hauling the pump 120m out of the ground to discover it needed to be replaced...along with its cable, pipe and rope.
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It was another unexpected cost which merely contributes to my active avoidance of checking the accounts to see if we actually have enough money left to finish our project.
My former BBC colleague and audio-genius friend Peter Emmerson helped us through the first two weeks of the podcast launch.
Episode 2 went live yesterday – please head over to the wine blog and sign up if you haven’t already...or just search for Ana & Al's Big Portuguese Wine Adventure where you get your podcasts or have a listen here:
You’ll remember our friend John Rourke from my last despatch: the Scottish strimmer and cork floor fitting fiend who dragged his pal Tony over to cork click-floor our mezzanines.
John said he’d be back to finish the job after a short trip home, but decided to have a heart attack in Scotland instead...I mean, as far as excuses go that’s a pretty good one.
T

There have been occasions when I’ve strolled up to our building site expecting a hive of activity, only to discover the Mary Celeste.
Perhaps that’s an apt comparison, given the abandoned ship was found drifting somewhere between the Azores islands and the Portuguese coast in 1872 with no crew – what happened to them remains a mystery to this day.
Tumble weeds don’t even grow here, but I’d swear I’ve seen them in the corner of my eye on those days where a sprinkle of drizzle or an ominous weather forecast has kept everyone away despite a daunting list of deadlines.
Inoculated by past disappointments I wandered up the hill this week with low expectations, only to stumble into rush hour at Paddington Station.
I struggled to find a parking space among the various sized white vans, piles of newly delivered limestone cobbles, and rumbling trucks.
There were electricians and carpenters, gutter fitters and pool people, the plumber, the water guy, delivery drivers, and...drumroll please...the door and window installers!
Our hopes and dreams, our wishes and requests, our letters to Santa Claus...had all answered by the arrival of the PVC people and their large truck of fabulous frames and gorgeous glass.
We’re finally getting somewhere after the many months of transforming a scraggy eucalyptus forest into something approaching an off-grid eco-luxe resort.
And as the workers are seemingly focussing on the finishing line we’re hitting the buy button on chairs and tables, lamps and loungers, umbrellas and bedside tables...to get all the finishings – at least – in the post.
I wondered the scene with my mouth open. I love it when a plan comes together.
But what’s truly amazing is all our wonderful friends who have been dropping everything to answer our call for help.
“I’d like to help with some strimming,” John Rourke messaged a few weeks ago.
With the fire regulations deadline fast approaching for clearing land 50m from every building that is not something you say no to.
Our Scottish friend who lives about 45 minutes away in Cercal arrived with a car-load of strimming machines, all fuelled up and ready for action (he even brought his own water bottles to keep hydrated through the job!).
I’ve been putting off the annual weight-loss programme as long as possible and this was just the kick I needed to get things started.
I should know by now that strimmers emerge from their winter hibernation with missing parts, wobbly fittings and absent essentials which always require at least a couple of trips to the local Stihl shop.
John’s already been strimming his land for weeks and so was totally in the rhythm on the hillside while I was spending ages getting up to speed.
He stayed the night to get an early start and had sorted most of the land above the house before I’d really got anywhere in the citrus grove – moving all the dead agave flowers from last year and trying not to get too tangled up in the ancient un-irrigated grape vines and left over electric fence.
I’d patched up a dodgy wire-strimming fitting which lasted right up until it didn’t – when the whole thing flew off in every direction…including towards the side window of our neighbour Daniel’s car.
While I can’t say for sure that the exploding strimmer was responsible for his shattered glass, it’s probably more likely than a toad with a catapult.
While John strimmed ever onwards, the Stihl shop was sadly awaiting a delivery – providing me with just the excuse I needed to focus on something else for the time being.
And there has been plenty to focus on.
The post-it wall has remained stubbornly static as the daily demands of project managing the workers and keeping power humming and water running has required regular shuttle runs up and down the valley.
Pumps and the various workmen’s tools all running at once tended to trip the fuses, so it required careful management and repeated visits to the fuse box.
Filling the pool without a gr

The first sign of summer is when planting a tree turns from simply picking a spot and digging up a bit of soil...to battering through concrete.
It took just two days of mid-20s Celsius for the ground to turn from being soft and simple to dig, mix in with compost and happily plant, to needing a medieval throwing spear to break the surface and leave us longing for a pneumatic drill to finish the job.
It’s also a sign it’s now probably too late for us to do much of our planned landscaping.
Half the lavender planted in front of our new villa is thriving, while the other half is struggling...the difference being three days and one light shower.
Thankfully our great friends Ed, Rachael and Daisy were visiting – they brought along their great pals Medwin and Emily – and we roped them all into a little plant-off to get in the fruit trees, a few olives, figs and medronhoplants...and even twisted Ed’s arm to design us a new logo.
We have so many more trees and plants to place, but delays to the building work and so much rain lingering in the clay has limited our planting window.
For our first season we will do what we can by laying a lot of gravel and mulch, starting on a cactus garden and mixing in all the cover crops on the vineyard area to improve the soil before we plant next March.
After so much rain we almost got sick of it (we didn’t, of course), but the sudden arrival of ample sunshine and high temperatures also brought a rush of workmen bursting back on site like a field of daisies.
Once the Easter break was out of the way, our hilltop was filled with cars as on one extraordinary day we enjoyed the company of the builders, carpenters, electricians, painters and our water consultant. All on one day.
The pool preparation people even arrived a day early...brilliant, but it created another layer of complication requiring a wild goose chase to track down our plumber whose attendance was courteously requested.
The post-it note wall is back and is as packed and full as ever...but the order of achievement priority has been recalibrated from “quarter one” through “quarter four” to “today”, “tomorrow” and “yesterday”.
Things are certainly happening...I had to go through photographs and the diary simply to remember all the stuff which has been done since my last despatch...and that’s a very good thing.
We have stairs in both apartments and the metal handrail makers will be back on Monday to measure up the safety barriers; the cork floors have arrived; the pool pump is in, and its concrete structure has been prepped for its final pebbly layer which is due next week.
The discovery that our infinity pool overflow tank was too shallow required some quick cement-block action, but that ended well.
The water infrastructure has taken a couple of major steps forward towards flowing – even if our key borehole has for some strange reason stopped working right now and our house supply is dwindling (well, I did want the tank empty in order to paint it with a drinking water seal anyway!).
The solar pump, on neighbour Daniel’s land, is now bringing irrigation canal water hundreds of meters up the valley to mix in with our salty borehole supply (when available); and the house and panel rainwater capture system is almost finished...just in time for the summer drought.
We need about 60,000 litres of mixed and treated water by next Thursday...but that requires electricity to run the pumps and the softener...and clean tanks to store it in.
I messed up on the tank front by asking for soil to be piled onto the sides without properly reinforcing the tank first needing some extra bulldozer hours to undo and redo that job.
And the power grid appears to require the kind of focussed attention not supplied by the occasional drop-ins by the electrician checking on his worker.
At least we found the electrical cable that connects the current guesthouse.
You may remember months of random digging, detective work and the unsuccessf

We’ve worried about water for three years now – since we started our crazy off-grid adventure – but had no idea we’d be dealing with too much rather than too little.
Nevertheless, we are still happy to see the heavens open, despite months of above average rainfall – thanks to El Niño – and a massive storm system that’s been sitting off the coast of Ireland and hammering the Iberian peninsula all week.
Lisbon’s steep and narrow streets briefly turned to rivers, a video clip of a rare water spout near the Vasco de Gama bridge in the capital made headlines around the world, and building work here in The Valley of the Stars has pretty much ground to halt.
Of course it’s easier to live with when the temperatures remain in double figures and the sun shines between squalls, topping up our solar system and keeping everything running.
As the climate changes, more extremes are expected, which is why we’ve invested in 200,000 litre pillow tanks to collect all the rain and save it for our guests during the long hot summers.
Sadly, neither the gutters nor the tanks have been installed in time to make use of all the water now overflowing from our lake into a new river which is flowing down the valley.
The system for harvesting rainwater from our house and the solar panels got one step closer this week as we placed and buried the tank and all the associated pipes.
The land also keeps sliding in various places – this week part of the hillside around the lake collapsed – and we do wish our doors and windows had been installed before this latest inundation.
At least the builders invested some time in an innovative, gale-proof construction of wood and insulation foam to block the doors and windows where the kitchens have now been installed.
The delay to this key part of the project has slowed everything down on the building site, but we did get a few things done despite the rain.
The unpolished concrete people were back between showers to try another way of improving our floors (we’re still disappointed in the way they look) and the metal workers installed one of the two staircases,
Heat Pump Paulo connected everything up for the water and underfloor heating – as much as he could until we get all our utilities online (while also providing us all with plates of his famous fabulous rabbit and rice lunch).
We’re being drip-fed a water treatment system, and the absence of an electrician is perhaps expected given the poor relationship between rain and electricity.
At the very least we look forward to the years ahead when the rainwater has soaked through the ground and eventually reached the level of our borehole.
Of course the combination of rain and sunshine is fuelling some pretty impressive springtime sprouting.
We marvel at the green hillsides, the flowering estevas (rockroses), the revived and fast-growing grape vines and the colourful weekly additions to the pointillism painting that is the Alentejo spring.
It’s yellow time at the moment as everything bursts into life, and it’s weird to imagine all this vibrancy will be baked away in a month or two when summer sets in.
And for every day that more power and water is piled into the vegetation, my strimming workload grows.
Areas 50m around every building need to be cleared by the end of April to protect from fire, and three new buildings broadens my Spring fitness regime quite significantly.
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We’re taking advantage of the sodden soil to pull out the tall and woody esteva which needs to be removed every few years as the combination of dry stems and oily leaves burn like little torches.
Fortunately, the large area of eucalyptus plantation on the other side of the hill has been chopped down and dug out, providing a vast fire break if the unlikely was to happen this year.
Everything is so easy to weed when it’s this wet, and so we need to take adv

We love having friends over – especially the ones who haven’t been to our place in a while.
“Wow...you’ve done so much! It’s amazing...it’s almost finished,” they all say and we breathe out a little, smile and nod to each other acknowledging the reminder of just how far we have actually come in such a short time.
Blessed by the reassurance we aren’t complete idiots we can relax into a nice lunch and present a little Alentejo tell-and-taste wine story, imagining a day when we’re finished enough to open and do this for strangers.
Then all the worries start flooding back in.
But before I plunge into the long list of sleep-sapping challenges, something else lifted my spirits this week...something that reminded me of the way the building started.
It’s all about the small things, and it first happened when this whole crazy project hung in the balance, when Ana and I took turns telling the other why it was madness and when the loan was about to time out without a single receipt being filed.
Despite having no builder under contract, no construction permit and no deposit paid, a large pile of steel reinforcing rods turned up one day.
They weren’t invited, they weren’t expected, they hadn’t been paid for, but yet they were there – maybe ten thousand euros’ worth – on the bit of flat land that used to be a eucalyptus forest.
That’s when we realised it was going to happen.
This week it wasn’t an arrival which marked a milestone, but it was the departure...of a machine which has fascinated me since it first landed.
The giant red cement mixer on wheels scoops up ratios of sand, gravel and cement by the bulldozer bucket.
It churned out foundations, pillars and beams...and now it’s gone.
Wooden boards, building materials, scaffolding have all slowly been melting away and everything starting to look a bit less like a building site and a bit more like an off-grid eco-luxe countryside lodge.
Maybe we are almost finished?
The heat pumps have finally migrated from sheltering under plastic on the hillside to taking up their positions ready for installation, and our focus has firmly shifted towards the interiors which Ana has been hammering away at for months now.
Malcolm Gladwell argues you need 10,000 hours to attain true expertise in anything and Ana’s not far off when it comes to developing the style of our interiors.
The beds are ready for delivery, the leather sofas and beautiful headboards are here, one kitchen is on its way from Germany, two more are coming from nearby, we have fridges, a stove, cork flooring on order, marble tables being made and are investigating lighting.
We have to find the perfect wine tasting glasses, the right crockery, bedside tables, wardrobes, chairs, patio furniture...the Excel sheet is long and sprawling.
It’s a lot of shopping: sourcing, chasing, finding, thinking, researching, calculating and delving for discounts.
An unexpectedly speedy car service date gave us a day in the Algarve to wander and ponder in shops and factory stores and with the new-found confidence to spot a deal and go with it.
It was an expensive day but a fun day – we found ourselves smiling quite a lot – and it was punctuated by our regular Algarvian sushi lunch.
It’s curiously calming to spend large amounts of borrowed money, knowing that every single thing we buy is one less thing we need to buy.
The receipts are piling up and I’m desperately trying to keep up with the accounting: are we over budget (yes), is it by too much (hopefully not).
Should we have invested in the two stand up paddle boards for guests to rent out? (Probably not). Are they a good addition to the business and what we are offering? (Probably).
Sadly we missed this month’s auction, which is probably best given what we picked up last time around (a fruit machine was not on the Excel sheet).
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This week’