His enthusiastic description of the place sent us there on the next springlike Sunday. My husband, Alf, had been assigned as head of the political section at the U.S. Embassy in the Portuguese capital, pleased for his family at the prospect of a tour in Europe. We looked forward to learning about a culture new to us. The trip took about half an hour, the ferry moving through water the color of the intense sapphire blue seen in the pictures of Earth taken from space. In late winter the austere beauty of the peninsula was reminiscent of the windswept dunes of the Outer Banks of North Carolina.
Artifacts show it to have been inhabited since prehistoric days.
Phoenicians and others navigating along the Portuguese coast evidently used it as a trading post. The town lived mainly from fishing and salting and drying the catch. A tidal wave completely destroyed the town in 412 A.D. Centuries later, in 1858, salting tubs used for the fishing catch were reported to stretch for four kilometers along the Sado. Roman bricks which had formed the tubs' walls could still be found, as well as the occasional tip-tilted tub lying empty on the sand. In 1968, when development of the peninsula as a tourist resort began to be considered and hotels planned, the Portuguese government again moved to protect the ruins and decreed a boundary beyond which construction was prohibited.