Lisbon woke up grey for the first time since I landed, and for once a cloudy sky was exactly what I wanted. Everything I had read about the via ferrata warned about heat and sea humidity with nowhere to hide from either, so grey, for today, meant lucky.
Pickup was ten minutes on foot from the hostel, close enough that I stopped at a grocery store on the way for a croissant, a pastel de nata, and fresh orange juice, eating breakfast like an actual local instead of a tourist running on a schedule. My guide, Rafael, was already there when I arrived, ten minutes ahead of his own pickup time. The drive out took about an hour, most of it spent on food, on how differently the city moves compared to whatever lies past its edges, on the kind of small talk that turns into an actual conversation somewhere around the second topic. Rafael pointed out, more amused than surprised, that I had shown up eating exactly what a local eats first thing in the morning. We reached the office a little before ten, right on Praia do Creiro, a beach tucked into the Arrabida coastline that I would not have found on my own in a hundred years of looking.
Two more names to keep straight: Samuel and a second Rafael, our instructors for the day, which meant I spent the morning surrounded by more Rafaels than I had met in my entire life combined. They walked us through the gear, harness, helmet, the steel cable bolted into the rock that the via ferrata kit clips onto, and the two rules that mattered more than anything else: always keep at least one carabiner clipped to the cable, and never unclip both at once, cable to cable, hand over hand, no exceptions.
The rest of the group filled in around us. A Canadian who had been on the road for four months and had stopped answering questions about when it would end. A German couple two months into a trip of their own, both of them recently and deliberately unemployed, neither with much of an answer for what comes after this either. Two brothers of Arab descent from England, who spent most of the van ride arguing happily about nothing in particular. Everyone had quit something to be standing on that beach that morning, myself included, and nobody seemed to think it needed explaining. We were lucky about the clouds, someone mentioned: on a clear day the rock face holds the sun and the sea humidity in equal measure with nowhere to escape either, and for most of the next two hours there would be no shade to speak of and nowhere flat enough to properly rest.
Two hours on the rock
Fenda da Arrabida turned out to be a crack in the coastline the map does not really prepare you for: limestone walls dropping straight into the sea, hidden well enough inside the park that you would need someone who already knew it was there to find it. We moved through it in pieces, climbing where the rock allowed it, clipping into cable where it did not, dropping into a natural cave at one point that swallowed all the outside noise for a few minutes, then rappelling down a face that had looked, from the top, considerably shorter than it turned out to be. Samuel and the second Rafael called out holds and warnings the whole way, and between the harder sections told us what we were actually climbing through: rock older than most countries, plants that grow nowhere else on the planet, a geology lesson delivered one handhold at a time. Two hours of it left my forearms shaking and my opinion of my own upper body strength permanently and accurately corrected.
