I had planned to come back to Portugal in January for a long while. The idea was to pick up the olive oil we produced from last November harvest and prune the vines and some of the fruit trees. I was traveling with my son this time so on top of the things I planned to do I was also looking forward to spend a few days with my 23 year old.
The trip started very early as usual, we left the house at 4:30 am as we needed to take an alternative highway due to the cut in one of the main highways. Everything was fine and after a breakfast stop in the middle of the country before reaching Madrid, we enjoyed seeing all the landscape covered by fresh snow.
We reached our destination at 2:30pm local time, just to have lunch at one of the local restaurants. The weather forecast was not promising showing rain for the whole week except for the weekend so we decided to take care of the pruning the whole Sunday, leaving the rest of the days for little works on the house and thursday to end the pruning and harvesting some lemons and oranges. The lemon tree had and incredible amount of lemons so taking some home to was a must.
Monday and Tuesday the rain was a constant, we had an appointment on Monday to pick up the olive oil from the press.
After that, besides fixing some minor things we decided to cover the porch roof with a plastic mesh ned from the interior to avoid birds getting there and leaving all the porch full of their poo. We were thinking the best, quick and cheap way to solve that and using the left over construction nylon mesh and a nail gun was a good solution. We will discover if it did its job when we come back at in the spring.
Unfortunately, Tuesday night was a real nightmare. There were yellow warnings of rain and wind for the whole night but the wind warning became orange before going to bed. After a few hours of heavy rain the strong wind came as I have never experienced before. When we woke up the next day we could see the consecuences with roof tiles broken, broken tree branches all over, solar panel installations blown away as well as farm chiken cups and minor animal construction. The electric power was off but we did not realize as our solar system was working as usual. We had been lucky as our farm was quite fine, just some minor branches from old oak trees had broken and a full amount of lemons and oranges where on the floor which helped me harvest them instead of having to use the ladder.
In the middle of the day we started getting messages from friends reporting about the damage on their houses and farms. I noticed the internet was not working very wall the night before but did not pay too much attention. As the damage on our farm were minor, we were not aware of the dimentions of the storm in the night. Unfortunately they were devastating with lots of losses included some people.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c205yl3kvzmo
As the weather forecast showed rain for the rest of the week we decided to drive back home on Thursday instead of Saturday with a bitter sweet feeling of having had a chance to do most of the work we had planned and seen some friends but seeing to mother nature caused so many losses.
