Clouds raced across the Atlantic as deep blue ocean swells heaved south toward Africa. Screeching gulls and petrels glided on the wind, just below the lip of a 200-foot sea cliff. Peering over the edge, our family of four could just make out a string of tiny beaches and sea caves along Portugal’s pockmarked southern coast — a rugged, 100-mile expanse known for thousands of years as “the end of the world.”
As the southwesternmost point of land in Europe, the Algarve coastline is often the last sight sailors see before voyaging into what the Arab geographer Al-Idrisi in 1154 called “the Dark Sea.” The open ocean was considered a netherworld back then, riddled with sea monsters and fantastical whirlpools. That is, until the early 1400s when Portugal’s Prince Henry the Navigator set about studying and teaching seafaring from a station in Sagres at the southern tip of the Algarve that ultimately dispelled these myths and launched the Age of Discovery.
When Henry was born to Portugal’s King John I in 1394, the country was far from the nautical power it would one day become. Henry earned his knighthood at the age of 21 — in a daring naval invasion of northern Africa — and was placed in charge of the militarily powerful Order of Christ. He had long been fascinated by the sea and soon diverted much of the Order’s budget from future religious wars to the seafaring school in Sagres.
While the school was set on the notoriously violent Atlantic, the Algarve coastline that stretches a hundred miles east from Sagres — past Albufeira, Portimão, Lagos and the Spanish border — was sheltered from prevailing northerly winds, making it a perfect testing ground for new ship designs, young seamen and a handpicked group of captains studying celestial navigation, meteorology, oceanography and marine biology.
As a sailing family, we had always wanted to visit the site of Prince Henry’s school and follow his footprints through the Algarve. We started our trip in the coastal city of Lagos where many of his most famous captains set off to lands unknown to Europeans: Bartolomeu Dias (Southwestern Africa), Vasco da Gama (Cape of Good Hope and India), Diogo de Teive (Newfoundland), many of them years before Christopher Columbus set sail for the Americas.
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