Direction Ponta da Piedade, about 45 minutes from Albufeira. A magical place that you should not miss.
The arrival is easy. There is a large parking lot and the path is very well marked. A wooden boardwalk guides visitors along the cliffs. Then suddenly I see them: magnificent stairs descending toward the sea. The view is breathtaking. Dark blue water mixed with turquoise shades contrasts with the ochre color of the cliffs. I overhear a guide explaining that each rock formation bears the name of a local fisherman.
At the bottom of the staircase, small boats take visitors through the nearby caves. Unfortunately, I have no cash and, true to my habit, I booked nothing in advance.
This place is beautiful. It reminds me a little of Diamond Beach in Bali. Not because they look the same, but because they create the same feeling. I take out my camera to capture the scenery while trying not to trip. The cliffs remain surprisingly accessible to curious visitors. A guide tells his group that this is one of the best places in the Algarve to watch the sunset. I immediately decide that I will come back later.
About fifteen minutes away on foot is Praia do Camilo: a wooden staircase descends to a small cove, and a tunnel through the rock opens onto a second beach beside it. At this hour both are already crowded and it is difficult to find a place in the shade. The water is turquoise.
Eventually I find a thin patch of shade at the foot of the cliff, under the signs warning of falling rocks, and there it is finally quiet.
I open my book, Soufi, mon amour. I love this book.
It holds two stories at once. A woman in our own time, her tidy life quietly coming apart; and, eight hundred years before her, the meeting of the poet Rumi with a wandering dervish named Shams of Tabriz. Two centuries leaning toward each other across the distance. It is how I am finding my way into Sufism, the mystical current of Islam, less concerned with the letter of the law than with clearing the heart and reaching the divine through love.
One image stays with me. The religious law of Islam, the book says, is like a candle: precious light in the dark. But if you spend the whole journey with your eyes on the flame, you forget it was lit for one reason only, to show you the road. There is an irony in that I keep turning over.
I come from Mauritania, a country with deep Sufi roots, and what I love in the Islam I grew up inside is how much air it leaves around you, how free it breathes. Whether that comes from our nomadic origins, a desert people shaped by wide horizons and almost no walls, or from the long patience of Sufism, I cannot say. Both, most likely. That openness has quietly kept me standing as an Arab woman from a conservative country, because I know the faith from within: its generosity, its room to breathe. It is not always the version I have met here in Europe, which can be a harder, narrower thing.
How good it is, I think, to give an afternoon to a book and not a screen. To read instead of perform. To live for oneself, and not through the approval of others. I travel for myself. I write for myself.
The heat sits almost too heavy, then turns kind the moment I lower my feet into the sea. Warm skin, cool water breaking over it, a small and welcome contradiction.
I go back to the book and underline a line: if we are the same after love as we were before, we have not loved enough. I close it on one finger and watch the sea a while. The waves keep arriving. I turn the page, already wanting the next one.
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