Our time in Nazare, Portugal was great. We only had one full day there and we made the most of it! We started with going to market, stopped off to watch sand soccer in an impromptu stadium on the beach, had a picnic lunch, hung out on the beach, took the funicular up to the Sitio for sunset (gorgeous!), came back down the funicular to Nazare and enjoyed a phenomenal mixed grill of fresh fish for dinner. Wow!
You Must Try Barnacles in Nazare
After breakfast at the Hotel Ribamar, we walked down to the farmers and fishermen’s market to pick up some things for a picnic lunch (one of our favorite things to do). Here we found the infamous percebes (barnacles).
As we had read the lady was eager for us to try one for free. I went first. She demonstrated how to twist the end off and then gently pull the meat out from the tough outer casing and handed it to me. I gamely ate the entire thing (about two inches long) and said that I thought it was pretty good and that Dave should now try one, which he did. His comment was, “not too bad.” He then proceeded to buy a fistful of these things! We rounded out our picnic with some fresh tomatoes, some cheese, a lime for the barnacles, a raisin bun, and some meringue cookies.
After strolling back down the beachside promenade and taking in some sand soccer, we went up to our little terrace to enjoy our picnic lunch. We halved the lime and as we twisted and extracted our barnacle meat we squeezed some lime juice on for flavoring. It helped. We probably had about a dozen or more of these things. As we got to the last few, we started encouraging each other to finish them off. That’s when we realized that neither of us really cared much for them. Not wanting to be wasteful, we did finish them but, never again. Been there, done that!
Looking forward to our time in Galicia.
