Today was a day for exploring Tavira East. Ostensibly, it was to scope out the way to Aquasul, a restaurant where my wife and I are meeting my cousin and her husband for dinner tomorrow.
But after locating it on R. August da Silva Carvalho, we found the area so unexpectedly charming that we decided to explore the nabe a little further.
This section of Tavira reminds me of Vieux Nice as it used to be, before it got all touristed up.
We saw plenty of restored houses, some quite magnificent, other not so much. The ones with the tiled front wall facades, in particular, evoke the Arabic ornamental art notion of horror vacui, or fear of emptiness — though that is perhaps too facile an observation,
Despite the mixed bag nature of this section of town, we rather enjoyed our walkabout.
Perhaps this part of Tavira, if you have a sense of initiative and a willingness to shake on private rental arrangements, is still cheap enough for dreaming.
Cheap enough for expats with little money or artists and mad writers and poets to live in some of the more faded tenements and shape new universes under the scorching Iberian sun, as they once did, in places like the East Village, before Manhattan was transformed into a barren warren of money-soaked one per centers with not a creative bone left in their over privileged bodies.
We finished the walkabout by crossing over to Tavira West on the “new” bridge (build many years ago, by the army, in 10 days flat), and had lunch at a cafe we liked called Flavors, that was launched in January of this year by a Portuguese barista.
Enjoy the pics!
Leaving Amerika 