Travelling through Portugal, we arrived to the Algarve region. Our first stop was Albufeira, where I was able to dive in the Portuguese waters.

 

Visiting Albufeira

During summer, Albufeira is transformed into a vacation center for European tourists who visit its beaches. The city center is full of bars, restaurants and karaokes, most oriented towards anglo-saxon tourism. During july they must be very noisy but by the time we visited the city (late october) they were quiet. The coast is really pretty with many little white houses on high cliffs over large beaches.

Where to stay in the Algarve

Albufeira doesn´t have an historical center as the cities of Lagos or Faro. We chose to base there because being in the middle of the Algarve we found it easy to make day trips to other coastal cities to the east and west. I will soon write another post about those visits to Lagos and Faro.

Scuba diving in Albufeira

As it could not be otherwise, one of my goals was to scuba dive but … for the month of october the winds are usually strong so I was able to go scuba diving just one day. I did the dives with Easydivers, very friendly and attentive people who operate from the marina of Albufeira, about 5km west of the city center.

The sea turned out to be very choppy so getting into and out of the water were not simple tasks. I appreciated having taken a dramamine as breakfast. Both dives were about half an hour distance from the coast of Albufeira in spots named ¨Wall¨ and ¨Doce veinte¨

Red scorpion fish camouflaged

Wall: It was an interesting dive on a reef stepped with small roofs systems. The visibility was good, over 10 meters and the water temperature was 19 ° C (66 ° F) (I rented a 7mm wet suit). Below the roofs we found a typical hidden conger, several spider crabs and a fangtooth moray eel (nice!). We also came across several small nudibranchs about 1 centimeter long.

Conger

Fangtooth moray eel

Doce veinte: close to the previous spot with very similar roofs. We felt more current than in the previous dive and we reached a maximum depth of 19 meters. In the bottom we found several lost fishermen’s cages. Between the rocks we found two octopus (survivors?) and I took some nice photograph of them.

Back in Albufeira I had to recover some energies so we went eating a typical cataplana with green wine! I would have liked to dive a bit more but the weather did not allow it. Maybe next time!

Cataplana and green wine