A Bit of a Rewind

Last Saturday, the afternoon before John's party, Kim and I had booked a boat trip on the Sado Estuary to see the dolphins.  Obviously, the excitement of John's party distracted me from the blog I had intended to write about the experience.  So, here goes.

The Sado River Estuary, which has been declared a Nature Reserve, is one of the few places in the world where a pod of bottlenose dolphins lives within a fresh water estuary.  The pod of approximately 30 dolphins is routinely spotting swimming, hunting or playing in the waters south of Setubal.  It's rare to find them in Europe, freely swimming in their natural habitat.  Therefore, these dolphins are, by far, the best well studied dolphins in Portugal.  They are also in the top 5 of the most monitored dolphins in Europe.  The resident dolphins of the Sado Estuary constitute one of the smallest and most endangered populations in the world.  Geologic and genetic findings put the colonization of the Sado Estuary by the bottlenose population thousands of years ago.  Most likely, shortly after the formation of the estuary itself, during mid-Holocene around 8000-6000 years ago. The earliest human settlements, only came during the Neolithic, ~2000 years later.  Due to this, dolphins are embedded in the local culture as they arrived before any human.  This close relationship can be seen in Roman art.  In 1863, the zoologist José Vicente Barbosa du Bocage observed that the dolphins found in the Sado Estuary were not occasional, which indicated the possibility of residency.  However, the proof of the dolphins residency only came 118 years later.

We'd booked our tour through a company called Rotas do Sal and it took about 2 hours.  The tour took us across the Sado estuary towards the Troia peninsula and its sand bars.  We then headed a bit west and regularly spotted the dolphins but you sure needed to be very quick to get a photo.  We continued along the coast to near the base of the Arrabida mountains before heading back east towards Setubal.  It was there when we got our best glimpses of them as well as the beautiful coastline.  Some of the sights included a fortress, a former TB hospital now used as an orthopaedic hospital, a small castle where purportedly Jackie Kennedy stayed for 6 months after JFK’s assassination, numerous sailing and kayak clubs before we returned to the marina. Here are some photos that, I hope, capture the afternoon.
























 

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