Kevin Gould is not impressed by Portugal's national dish of dried, salted cod, but finds the perky effervescence of its spa water irresistible.
I'd wanted to go to Portugal ever since Manchester United beat Benfica 4-1 in 1968. I'd always imagined a country full of the fire and passion of Eusebio's attacking football, so - with £99 air fares to Lisbon, and the promise of good, cheap wine and a week away from the kids - my wife Frances and I decided to see for ourselves. As we had no interest in joining the Ambre Solaired masses on the Algarve, we pointed our hire car north, following the route of the Visigoths and Vandals, who passed this way over 1,500 years ago.
The travel agent had whetted our palates with the usual dusty southern European hype. Instead we found more of a green scene, with endless plantations of skinny, fast-cropping eucalyptus trees, well-watered fields of salad and almost constant drizzle. The countryside is punctuated with sparkling whitewashed villages, although this vista has been rather tarnished by the brash villas built by returning locals who had left to look for work abroad. The sense of separation felt by migrant workers in this diaspora is referred to as saudade or longing, a feeling that what went before was better than what will be. This melancholic nostalgia is lyrically expressed in the national love of fado, Portugal's most famous music, which is pitched somewhere between the blues and flamenco. In bars and restaurants throughout the land, singers of passion and immense sadness will have you sobbing into your soup.
Our longing for lunch led us one day towards the main square of Tomar, a pretty town in the Ribatejo province dominated by a Knights Templar fort. It was here that we had the first of our many meetings with bacalhau - cod from the freezing seas around Scandinavia, dried and heavily salted. The sides of smelly cardboard seen hanging in every grocery store are soaked and washed for a day or two before being turned into some of the 365 dishes so proudly advertised at every restaurant in the country. The Portuguese may derive some perverse pleasure from eating reconstituted fish in a land boasting 1,000km of coastline and hundreds of fishing villages, but we didn't.
The only advantage in subjecting ourselves to such salty fare was that it gave us a thirst; the zippy, spritzy vinhos verdes of Minho are wines designed to cut through the unremitting diet. For us, though, the bottled water was the winner. At every stop, from the Art Deco bars of Tomar to the hill-village inns of Marvão, we would sample a bottle of naturally sparkling, richly mineralled, thirst-conquering agua com gas. Our favourites were soon established: the waters of Vidago and its sister spa Pedras Salgadas had just the right amount of fizz and fluorides to entertain our tongues while encouraging our drowsy digestions to keep the bloody bacalhau at bay.
It was essential to find something other than fado to listen to in the car if we were to continue touring without exhausting the Kleenex, so, with the lilting rhythms of the ex-colony Cabo Verde caressing us, we grooved northward to Chaves, famous for its twin spas, smoked ham and, er, bacalhau. The Portuguese learned the notion of spa cures from the Romans, who called Chaves 'Aquae Flaviae', and the rich and the ailing have submitted themselves to residential resorts for the treatment of every imaginable complaint ever since. At the end of the last century, huge sanitoria were erected around Chaves in the overblown belle époque style, so that those with overworked livers and delicate digestions could rest and recuperate.
Yet there are more famous spas in Portugal than those around Chaves. At Caldas da Rainha, near Ôbidos, the curative qualities of the hot springs prompted the 15th-century Queen Leonor to order her courtiers to take the plunge in the whiffy waters. Her example is still followed by Portuguese physicians, who regularly prescribe a week's punishment at the royal resort. Taking the waters has a whole new meaning for those patients forced to undergo 'the nasal wash', where warm water is snorted up one nostril only to shoot out the other, an alarming ritual which renders the bad-egg odour of the sulphur-rich spa more keen than ever.
There's no sulphur smell from Pedras Salgadas. The ionised air, subtly scented with pine from the surrounding hills, invokes a great feeling of lively wellbeing. The pH-balanced natural salts of sodium, iron, fluoride and bicarbonate are in perfect harmony with the giggly fizz of natural carbon dioxide. The pétillant pleasure in sipping such tiny bubbles makes other spring waters, where CO2 is pumped in under pressure during bottling, seem crude and gassy. And while the complexes at Vidago and Pedras Salgadas accept guests only during the summer season, a visit at any time to one of the magnificently tiled buvettes in the shady grounds is a must. Bubbling out of ornamental spigots at a constant 15°, the waters are taken from charming hand-crocheted glass holders. And in this age of polluted watercourses and plutonium half-lives, a drink of this soft spring water seems doubly nourishing. 'Pedras Salgadas' may sound Polish when pronounced in the local dialect of the Trás os Montes province, but in our mouths it's satin, pure and simple.