Parking problems in Portugal or how we nearly lost the car!

On Thursday my friends and I set off on another day’s hard sight-seeing. It’s a serious business being a tourist. You need to work at it consistently. This time our plan was to visit Tui, have a look round and then cross the bridge over the Miño into Valença on the Portuguese side of the river. When we got to Tui, however, it was market day and there was not a parking spot to be had so we decided to do the trip in reverse order and went to Valença first.

We admired the fortifications. There are lots of them. We admired them a lot. And we looked closely at the cannons. At the tourist office my friend asked the age of the fortifications and was given a leaflet in English so nearly incomprehensible that I went back in and asked for one in Spanish.

Now, I spoke Spanish and the poor tourist office chappie was bewildered. “¿La otra señora es inglesa?” he asked me. I reassured him that she was indeed English and went on my way. A good game this: confuse a tourist office man. A bit unfair as it was not his fault, I suppose, that the English in the leaflet was so poor.

Mind you the Spanish one was not a great deal better but I really couldn’t go back and ask for one in Portuguese. In any case, although I can read the language, my spoken Portuguese is almost non-existent so I couldn’t continue with my game. The English leaflet talks about the perimeter walls, telling us that “the fortress saw the first ones edified by the 13th century” and that the whole fortification is “awaiting the cultural heritage of humanity classification”. (The Torre Hércules in La Coruña has just got that.) It goes on to recommend eating “fuming plates of lamprey” but does not specify whether it is the plates or the lamprey that have to be angry.

Meanwhile the Spanish leaflet gives a completely different set of information and could have been written by a child borrowing incomprehensible bits from an encyclopaedia combined with oddments that look strangely like English badly translated into Spanish. What is clearly meant to be a description of shaking hands in the middle of a bridge is referred to as a “temblor de manos”, more of a “trembling” or “quaking” of hands – an earth shattering handshake perhaps. Once more I am left wondering just WHO does the translating for tourist boards.

Having comprehensively “done” the walls, we went in search of refreshment and found a café on the square. Once more we spoke a mixture of English and Spanish, only to discover that our waiter was Russian. What was a Russian doing waiting on in a café in Portugal, we wondered and asked him. The answer: he has been out of Russia for ten years now, working in different countries, picking up a bit of language in each as he goes along. He has worked in France, Germany, Italy, Spain and now Portugal. He would like to go to England but not America – too far!


So we went round the town, through the narrow streets, looked at the tiled walls of the old buildings and marvelled at how many churches could be fitted into such a small place.

Then, as we approached the gateway leading to the car park, we saw a truck next to our car, getting ready to tow it away.

Ironically, we had debated hard (well, relatively) about parking it there. When we arrived we had parked on a patch of waste ground but then saw signs to the car park and thought it would be more secure in an official parking place. (Hmmmmmm!!) The only remaining space was almost opposite one of the gates into the town but three other cars were parked in that place AND there were no road markings or other indications that it was not allowed so we left our car there. MISTAKE!!


Hindsight, that wonderful faculty, told us that it was actually a space that gave fire engines access to the town gate. Obvious once you knew that but, in our defence, there was no real indication to that effect AND others parked there before us. Anyway, we raced down the slope and I explained that we were about to leave and please, please, please could they NOT tow the car away.

I fully expected to get an “I’ve started so I’ll finish” response, involving having to collect the car from a pound somewhere miles away. At the very least, I felt sure we they would slap a hefty fine on us. But no, if we were leaving at once, we could take the car and go. This we did and the tow-truck men set about attaching their machinery to the car parked immediately behind ours, also in a wrong (unmarked) place.

Our relief was palpable. The conversation was rife with what-ifs. We scuttled out of town, across the Gustave Eiffel inspired bridge and out of the country.

Back in Spain we HAD to stop for home-made ice-cream on the main street in Tui, just by the bandstand on the edge of the old quarter, across the way from the Police Station. A large brandy might have been more appropriate but our driver had already been fined near Leon for not stopping completely at a STOP sign and she really did not want any more brushes with authority.

So we lived to tell the tale of our adventure in Portugal. That evening we had an excellent farewell meal in the Rías Baixas II restaurant here in Vigo, where they made a great fuss of us and discussed the merits of English football teams as they always do when we go there. And then on Friday morning our friends set off bright and early (OK, mid morning) for France, with only one false start for a forgotten bag of books.