Goodbye Isla da Fuzeta

This weekend in Southern Portugal the storms were so bad that a little of the island I sometimes live on, ‘went’. Alert the world: a little bit of Portugal has gone missing.

News crews came over on Monday. We tried to hoist gas fridges and beds onto boats, and out, the same day. The sea kept coming in. It has dredged a new channel through Armona Island. It’s not all gone, and some houses remain. Of course these are ‘houses’ built out of wood, rock and whatever was found lying around 100 years ago. There’s shell and rope in my walls, and yes, for now, it’s still standing. It’s surrounded by sea, though. It’s also surrounded by other wooden houses bobbing about in the grey water like buoys, and last night as I slept in the town, thunder and lighting told me it wasn’t over yet.

brass bed

I came to Armona Island – Isla da Fuzeta – as a teenager. I’d sleep out there with friends. I had my first kiss and fumble on the white sand. A friend’s father once told me not to swim in the open sea at night. ‘Why?’ I asked. ‘It’s feeding time,’ he replied, and wagged his stump of a finger at me. I saw my first whale in the Ria – the inlet of water on the other side of the island. Over the years and in other storms I’ve walked from one end of the Armona sand bar to the other. Beach combing, I’ve found: a huge (and dead) leatherback turtle, a pair of louvered doors, the end of a brass bed, and lots of single shoes.

My next novel is set on the island and I wonder if lived experience will alter the fiction?

This end of Armona has poshed up over the years. Tourists have meant a new shack-café, and, last year: parasols. It’s a working island, though: fishermen dominate, and there are French-owned oyster beds outside our door. I have a little rowboat, my father named it after my first novel – Happy Accidents. I’d row in the Ria with ‘Happy’ on one side and ‘Accidents’ on the other. I was slightly embarrassed; but the rowboat has gone.

And now? I have no idea. What will the fishermen do? What will the aqua taxi man do? Families have lost homes they’ve had for generations. ‘It’s the force of nature, you can’t do anything about that,’ my friend said. He was standing by his cracked house in his waterproofs, staring out at the grinding sea.