The picture at right is representative of the majority roads we encountered. But, compared to most this one is a super highway! What is not pictured here is the lack of pavement and the unbelievable number of holes in the road. In some cases we suspect that the only improvement the roads had had since the days of their initial construction was having tar placed directly on top of whatever dirt and stones were present when the road was first built. What is also not pictured are the numerous roads we encountered that were constructed out of cobbles - known to most as cobblestones. And let us be sure about this - we know what paving stones are. Many roads in towns and villages in Portugal have paving stones in use. Some have paving stones mixed with cobblestones as well.

Note the curved protrusion located between the tree and Verna’s bike. Pictured at left is a close-up of this mileage marker. These are the only things that we have found that give any indication of the route number of the road we are on. We have not been on the auto-estrada (motorway) but are that they are marked in a much better fashion. We have found some of the secondary roads to have better markings on them. These begin with letter designations of I whereas the roads we have been traveling have a letter designation of N. Everywhere else we have traveled in Europe the N designated roads are secondary to the Autobahn, Autopista, Motorway. We are not sure what classification the N roads have received here.

We have never seen roads in this state of disrepair in a European Union (EU) country and were quite surprised. We were told in a discussion with one of the locals that the current political party in power had ceased all work on the countries infrastructure for the last seven and a half years.

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