Mourão and the Birds

After breakfast D and I walked down to the town of Mourão whilst the other two came by car where we met with Emelinda for coffee and visited Cecilio at the library.  The photo was taken once we had driven over to Monsaraz where we had a walk round the walls, and lunch at Sahida, very good it was too.  

We had then planned to do a tour of the Sharish Gin company, at 3 pm but it turned out it started at 3:30 pm so we whiled away the extra time with, yes you guessed it, a gin and tonic!  The tour was really interesting, learning about how the different flavorings, way beyond juniper berries were steeped for 60 days in alcohol and water and then distilled before blending and bottling.  We followed this with a pure gin flight tasting which highlighted the very different flavors in some of the different gins they produce.  Antonio the owner of the company started 10 years ago using his wife's pressure cooker and some tubing from an AC coil - now they make and sell 140,000 bottles a year.
We had some fun on a drive around various interesting big stone erections, one of which looked literally like one.  Enough said.  The other extras were my wildlife shots of the day - a stork on its nest and a capture I was rather pleased with of a very small swift flying about under a bridge we stopped at.