Usually we are in the centre of the old town wherever we are. As we walked, it meant that we were on the camino, having easy access to food and other services, useful because we have to be prepared for unknowns when walking many kilometres and having destinations that need to be reached that day. Now it is very different because we are freer to make more relaxed choices.

To this extent we booked our lodgings a little outside of town for a change. It was still old but the streets taking us to town were clearly not sanitised for tourists. As in the outskirts of most large towns, Faro has its graffiti artists, some better than others, and we passed a couple of buildings that were artistically painted, a delight to the eye. In between were crumbling houses, vacant blocks and bargain clothing shops.

The streets at 10.00 am were empty as it was mothers day, at 1.00 we could barely find a lunch seat because of the celebrations, as we looked around this quiet, once Moorish city. The tourist office man told us there is today, hardly any indication of their previous occupation and suggested other things we might like to do.

I asked him where we could listen to the Portuguese guitarist advertised on his front door, and he pointed to a small man in a smaller hat. We bought our five euro tickets and walked up to what was the bell tower where this great Tommy Emmanuel fan was to perform. Little did we know as we walked up an extra stairway (because we love to look round corners), that we had entered the storks’ home, and for the first time we were only metres away from them, and able to touch one of the bells.

No time to play with them though, because Joao Cuna was about to play. Inside again and down the storks’ steps, we were entertained alongside our mixed age Dutch, German and French couples. Our enthusiastic clapping indicated the eight of us were enthralled by his melancholic Fado renditions as well as some more happy classical Portuguese pieces. I think Tommy would have been impressed. To add to this raft of spontaneity, the Dutchman asked if he could use one of his guitars in a duet – a very special hour.

Now it was back to the roof for our postponed photo shoot with the storks. There were three large occupied nests, with one of them celebrating mother’s day and another doing a sort of tango on the town clock as visiting relatives flew in for the festivities while mother noisily bill-clattered to them. An unscheduled morning’s entertainment was over – very saudade: ‘sad that its over but over the moon that it happened’.