It’s not often that a coffee and a pastry can delight and enrage in equal measure. On day one of a holiday in Portugal – a break booked in the winter of 2019 before the world went into Covid-19 lockdown and then came out of lockdown and almost immediately went into meltdown – I found myself staring hard at the receipt for two coffees, a chocolate milk and three pastries.
“There must be some mistake,” I mumbled, squinting with ageing eyes at the white paper covered in small numbers and unfamiliar words and then at the change I had just been handed from a five euro note. “How could all this cost €4.80?”
But there was no mistake. An excellent coffee and a pastry stuffed with magical Portuguese cream can be bought for a combined total of just €1.50 on the Algarve – a place well accustomed to dealing with high-rolling, big-spending golfer-types and villa owners from Ireland.
The camping holiday in Portugal was booked before any of us knew or cared what a wet market was and then rolled over to 2021 and then rolled over again into 2022
The well-heeled Irish are attracted to the Algarve not by the “cheap as chips” cream cakes or coffee but by the promise of endless sunshine, short flights, great seafood restaurants, crystal-clear ocean water and a population that has an astonishing command of English, one that puts our own linguistic (in)ability to shame.
But the bottom line is more central to the equation for me and I still simply cannot understand how a coffee and a pastel de nata cost so little there.
Or perhaps the better question is: why does it cost so much here?
A coffee and a pastry in Ireland will easily set you back more than €5 – and rarely will it taste as good as it does in Portugal. Such a price differential is, by any measure, absurd, and no amount of talk of higher overheads, higher taxes or a higher cost of living can justify it.
But a holiday is not all about coffees and pastries. There is a bit more to it than that and with the summer season over – or at least coming to an end – the time has come to tot up the costs.
The camping holiday in Portugal was booked before any of us knew or cared what a wet market was and then rolled over to 2021 and then rolled over again into 2022.
When I say camping, I don’t mean an in-tents holiday experience obviously. I couldn’t pitch a tent – at least one that stayed pitched – if your life depended on it. I mean one in a caravan (or a mobile home, or a chalet depending on how posh you want to sound) with a dishwasher and air conditioning and a shower and beds and a telly – the kind of camping that would make Bear Grylls cry.
While it was a self-catering type of holiday, the quality and the price of the food on offer in the restaurants in Lagos and the surrounding towns meant we were not tied to the kitchen in the same way we might have been at home
This two-bedroom chalet – let’s go posh – on the Algarve cost €2,400 for two July weeks. It wasn’t big – in truth it was pretty tiny – but it did have a decent-sized deck and with daytime temperatures rarely dipping below 30 degrees and three very child-friendly pools on site, the papal chalet was used for little more than sleeping, pouring milk over cereal and ablutions, so size really didn’t matter.
Flights for five to Faro – while pleasingly alliterative – cost a not-so-pleasing price of €1,600, give or take a few euro. Then there was the car hire. Much has been written about the price of renting a car at home and abroad going through the roof, and that certainly was the case. A five-seater Seat for two weeks set us back €1,100 – a price we were told at the car hire desk that was at least €500 more than it would have been in times past.
“At…
Read More: Guess which cost more – our 2022 holiday abroad, or last year’s staycation? –