Atlantic Bound! | BITE

Eighteen hundred miles from Bari to the Algarve, from the head of the Adriatic to the ocean: a route that retraces in reverse the road Phoenicians, Greeks and Romans took to enter the Mediterranean. We leave in September, once the southern sea has settled and the summer winds begin to ease, and reach the Portuguese coast by mid-October. The voyage reads in four movements. The first is Italian: the heel of Salento at Santa Maria di Leuca, the Magna Graecia of Crotone, then the Strait of Messina — three kilometres of water between Scylla and Charybdis, to be crossed with the tide tables in hand. The second is insular: the Aeolian Islands, Palermo and Trapani, the crossing to Sardinia, and the last Italian anchorage at Porto Pino before two hundred miles of open water to the Balearics. The third movement is Spanish. Menorca and the longest natural harbour in the Mediterranean, Mallorca and its yards, Ibiza and its Posidonia meadows, then the Iberian coast down to Gibraltar: the Pillars of Hercules, the edge of the world to the ancients and, to anyone sailing, the real gateway to the Atlantic. From there everything changes — three-metre tides, ocean swell, a different way of living aboard. The fourth movement is Atlantic: Cádiz, the oldest city in western Europe; the run up the Guadalquivir to Seville, eighty kilometres of river to moor in the heart of Andalusia; and finally the Algarve, the Ria Formosa and the cliffs of Albufeira. Nineteen landfalls, twenty-three centuries of Mediterranean history, and a single heading: west.