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One of the best things to buy in Portugal is the Portuguese wine. Portuguese wine is not exported as much as in other places, which is a great shame because the wines here are really prize-winning and they are excellent.
Pastries are excellent as well. If you like codfish, that’s good here, but most foreigners don’t seem to like codfish. There’s a huge variety of things that you can buy. There’s silver Portugal, which is very good. The porcelain is very good, as is the crystal, and there’s very good antiques.
If you want the “cheap and cheerful” things, there’s plenty of that as well.
And then you have what they call “custard tarts” which are in the Pastéis de Belém area (about half way between Lisbon Cascais, which is on the coast), and which is almost like a religion here. These are very good little custard tarts.
You really can get everything here in Portugal now and there are many countries that have what they call a “one-shop” where they’ve got mainly South African and British products from England. You’ve got a shop that is a Russian shop. There is an Ikea so the Swedes can get what they are missing from home.
It’s amazing that as small as Portugal is, when you’re down in the Alenteijo, which is an area that is just before the Algarve or even in the Algarve, the food is completely different. The area is different; it’s much more farm land. You have a lot of cork plantations there. As you start going up north, there as well, the food is different. Like any country, the pronunciations are different in the north of Portugal, but you have the same sort of things. You would have perhaps more lamb to eat down in Alenteijo than you would here. But Portugal is a bit of melting pot of everything. So at Christmas time, here they have the codfish on the 24th and then they’ll have turkey or lamb for the 25th and that’s pretty well all over now.
In addition to food, Portugal has arts and crafts. There’s a lot of very, very good pottery and china and porcelain. And, of course, what Portugal is very known for the hand painted tiles, a lot of which are antiques that are extremely expensive.
(Portuguese cookbook and tableware made and bought in Portugal, pictured.)
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