War zones were easier than going off-grid
Alastair Leithead’s front-line experiences as a BBC foreign correspondent were surprisingly useful for starting his new dream life in Portugal
There’s a magic I no longer take for granted: that water comes out of taps and lights come on at the flick of a switch. Even covering the war in Helmand the troops always managed power and water, I’d lived comfortably enough in a car through Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, and had managed to charge TV equipment while covering the Japanese tsunami. But when the taps ran dry and the lights went out in remote rural Portugal, I had no idea what to do.
It had sounded like such a romantic idea – going off the grid, working for the BBC remotely, maybe even opening a little bed and breakfast place. My Swedish/Portuguese diplomat wife Ana and I had found a piece of Portugal with the most amazing views, a solidly built home with a separate guesthouse and a solar power system.
What could possibly go wrong? Pretty much everything as it turns out.
It all began with a pre-pandemic plan to find some land with a ruined house to fix up. I had no immediate family left in the UK, so we would use it as our base in Europe. Our search focused on the Alentejo, the largest and most rural province in Portugal, stretching from Lisbon to the Algarve and from the Atlantic Ocean to Spain, and where Ana’s father’s family is from.
Ana did the real work of trawling through hundreds of Portuguese real estate websites, while I planned days of rolling hills, fabulous wines and amazing guesthouses. After a blur of disappointing ruins, we stumbled across our new home. When fate recommended us a great local lawyer, we made an offer the next day for less than £400,000 that was accepted.
After six months of remote mortgage applications and plenty of help from Ana’s sister Maria João in Lisbon, a little valley of cork oaks and fruit trees was ours. When we arrived in Portugal from the US last June, the house had been empty for more than a year. Wild boars had moved onto the land, making nests in the vegetable patch and partying in our muddy puddle of a lake. The view, however, was just as we remembered and the Milky Way was so clear, we decided to rename our place Vale das Estrelas, or Valley of the Stars.
The German woman we’d bought from had left everything: furniture, sheets, towels, cutlery… even two fondue sets still in the box and a rack of wine. Everything, that is, except an instruction manual. When the power went and the water stopped, I had to start working out where those things came from and why they weren’t coming from there anymore. I couldn’t even Google it.
Off the grid apparently also means no Wi-Fi. I found the borehole on top of one hill and a water tank on the opposite side of the valley, but to this day I still haven’t found the pipe that connects the two. The solar battery was a line of a dozen large, gas-gurgling red boxes full of lead and acid, and the diesel generator looked like it had been on a space mission – it made a lot of noise but produced no electricity. After two weeks of using all my investigative journalism skills, I discovered the cause was a leaking toilet. It was not only wasting water, but also constantly running an electric pump which was draining the old battery.
“Any fool can be uncomfortable,” I remember one of the soldiers at a base in Helmand telling me. The way the guys sculpted mugs out of mortarround tubes and turned wooden pallets into lounge furniture was an inspiration. But I’m just not that handy.
Alentejo has a lot of sunshine – we could go to the beach until November – but then the flooding began. We dug clay out of drainage pipes and diverted rivers down hills, but got stranded in the mud just trying to get a mile to the main road. We bought new tyres for Millicent the old Land Rover and she promptly broke down – twice – just before Christmas and then on New Year’s Eve. And just when it started to get cold, both boilers broke. They were so old even online instruction manuals were only written in German, and I can’t tell a Verbrennungsluftgebläse from a Rückschlagklappe.
After waiting a month for parts, the only way to fix it was to buy a secondhand control unit from Helmut on German eBay. Until mid-February we only had hot water when the sun shone.
One success story was getting an internet connection by radio link to a distant Algarve hillside. I’d had one like this years ago in Kabul and it had been brilliant. So now we can do Zoom calls and can even troubleshoot on Google.
Another success was getting a guard dog to scare off the wild boars.
I was once handed a pistol by a Royal Marine in Helmand “just in case” while sitting on the back of an open truck full of ammunition for a rescue mission down Taliban “ambush alley”. I once accidentally slept on a shallow grave in Afghanistan, and was ambushed three times in one day in South Sudan, but I’d never been bitten by a centipede so venomous my leg swelled up to twice its size. It took three weeks for my leg to return to its normal size. We currently have an amber alert on processionary pine caterpillars.
But I am learning a lot, including how to build. Thanks to a bloke from the village called Rui Dias, I can now make reinforced concrete, lay bricks, fit roofing and do woodwork and plastering. It means my phone regularly struggles to recognise me when acid, glue and multiple puncture wounds wear off my fingerprints and facial recognition wouldn’t cope with the “wild man of Alentejo” beard which started by accident in lockdown and now seems to fit the part.
The Portuguese class I took for a year while on a journalism fellowship at Stanford is helping a lot, but I’m still a shy speaker and Ana is bearing the weight of complicated bureaucracy conversations. Residency, registering for healthcare and switching my driver licence was pretty easy to do before the Brexit transition period ended. The Portuguese government is still encouraging foreigners to move here and offering golden visas in exchange for investment.
I’ll need to top up my Portuguese to pass the citizenship test and become a dual national. The cost of living in Portugal is quite low and we’re living off our savings for now, but we’re hoping when international travel starts again, we’ll get some income from the guesthouse and funding to build our planned eco-lodge.
But with Portugal still on the red list and not quite out of lockdown, it could be a while before tourists come back in the numbers they did before. Retired British friends in the Algarve have been stuck here since December, with their flights home being repeatedly cancelled. Britain’s restrictions on Portugal throughout the pandemic have been considered unnecessarily harsh.
But we’ve been very lucky in Alentejo: with low infection rates in the area and access to miles of coast and countryside, we can easily forget how badly affected other parts of Portugal have been since Christmas. Hospitals were under so much pressure at one point, help had to be sent from other European countries. But now the vaccine is starting to be rolled out – and at 48 I’m still waiting for mine – the number of deaths and new infections have passed the worst.
Life here is hard, but it’s beautiful. It’s challenging, but also brilliant. And the view by day and night still takes our breath away.
I’ve covered wars and natural disasters but had no idea how to fix a tap