Seafood Festival Update

Posted on August 16, 2007
Filed Under Algarve Events

It’s a sad day, Olhao’s annual seafood festival is now over, but I say this with a happy belly : )

Yesterday was the last of the six day long festival - the selection of everything, right up to the end was impressive. So I got my fix of seafood rice, crab, clams, shrimp, lots of shrimp actually - grilled, peel & eat, pan fried with tons garlic and butter…heaven!

Olhao Seafood Festival

While I watched and smelt pans bubbling with garlicky, buttery shrimp under my nose, it seemed like an eternity until I had mine. Then suddenly, I spotted a chef adding a good soak of something in a bottle to a pan…could it be? Couldn’t quite make out the bottle, but it was definitely of the of “spirits” family… wooohoo! I was in for a treat! But now my impatience grew… I quickly memorized my call number, there were a lot of hungry and impatient faces waiting to snap up the next hot batch, so I needed to be ready, this could get ugly.

Olhao Seafood Festival Algarve

Fortunately, there was no bloodshed, and although the wait was long, or so I thought, it was very worth it. My very messy buttery, garlicky and partly drunken shrimp were out of this world!

To end the finger licking meal, we of course had to finish with dessert! We had spotted a sweet vendor earlier that couldn’t be passed up. But first, a detour to the Caipirinha stand…we contemplated about coffee, but the line up at the coffee booths stood at least 40 people long! Portuguese love their coffee; I’ll explain our fanaticism with caffeine on a later post.

Farturas the Portuguese version of donuts

So with Caipirinhas in hand off to the desserts, and there was no shortage of selection here either, salami (chocolate roles), pasties de nata, morgado, tarte de laranja, amêndoa, dom rodrigos….all the traditional favorites, fresh for the choosing. If you didn’t know before, now you know, the Portuguese have a serious sweet tooth. So, we picked out a few and got them in a box “to go” thinking it might be better to take them home…that idea didn’t last long, within 2 minutes all that was left was one little coconut role we saved for breakfast.

The nights attractions were of course seafood, but also a concert by former Spice Girl Melanie C, who drew a big crowd but I have to admit the vibe last year with Daniela Mercury had more energy. But from my experience its pretty tough to beat the entertainment energy of popular Brazilian artists, regardless didn’t see anyone complaining.

Spice Girl Melanie C in Algarve