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  • Portugal Santo_isidoro
  • REPORTERMegumi Ota

I’m a conservator and preservationist living in Portugal. I specialize primarily in paintings (murals) and gold leaf design, and am involved with UNESCO World Heritage structures as well as the interior of the Palace of Belém. I derive great satisfaction from having close ties to my community in the rural village near the Silver Coast where I live. My hobby is gardening.

  • Portugal Santo_isidoro
  • Megumi Ota
  • 2025.10.23
  • Sweet summer memories in Portugal: Bola de Berlim

  • You can’t walk into a café in Lisbon without seeing Bola de Berlim, a fluffy pastry coated in sugar. The calls of the vendors ring out along the hot beaches, “Olha a bolinha!I” (Get your bolinha!). They are an undeniable staple of summer. This sweet pastry didn’t originate in Portugal, however.
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  • 2025.09.26
  • Portugal named the seventh-safest country in the world

  • The 2025 Global Peace Index names Portugal as the seventh-safest country in the world. The GPI covers 99.7% of the global population, ranking 163 countries and regions based on how peaceful they are. It is prepared annually by the Institute for Economics and Peace (IEP), which commented that Portugal’s consistent placing in the top ten in recent years is a testament to the country’s recent improvements in crime awareness and political stability.
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  • 2025.08.28
  • Getting a gastrointestinal workup

  • The day after my husband left for Mozambique on a work trip, I went a little wild and ended up in an accident. I was watching my favorite football team, Sporting Lisbon, in the Portuguese soccer league semi-finals. It was a critical match that would take them to the league championship if they won, and everyone’s eyes were glued to the game. And… they did win! I really hit the drinks!
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  • 2025.07.07
  • AI as gods

  • As AI technology advances at an increasing rate, the general consensus is that by about the year 2045, it will reach a point called the “singularity,” where it will surpass human intelligence.
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  • 2025.06.06
  • Blackout

  • The outage occurred on Monday, April 28. Not just across the whole of Portugal—it was found to have affected parts of Spain, France, and other areas as well. The rumors also suggested the possibility of atmospheric pollution, fires, and even cyberattacks.
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  • 2025.05.02
  • The 2025 Sea Urchin Festival

  • The Sea Urchin Festival was held March 21–30 this year at its usual site, the Mercado Municipal da Ericeira. It used to be held in the basement fish market area, but starting last year, they moved it to the craft sales area on the second floor—maybe because of all the cooking that’s involved.
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  • 2025.03.17
  • India

  • I went to India. I finally went!
    They say that you can’t go to India unless you are called there—that it is a place you are invited to go. Well, my chance finally came.
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  • 2025.01.15
  • The World Cheese Awards

  • The World Cheese Awards were held in Portugal for the first time ever this year. The WCA is known as the largest cheese event in the world—giving it the nickname “the Cheese Oscars.”
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  • 2024.12.12
  • Portugal, the playground of the rich

  • The price of Bolo Rei is apparently going up even more this Christmas. Bolo Rei is a traditional Christmas cake, and as we get closer to the holidays, we start to see it served at cafés along with the usual pastry and bread shops.
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  • 2024.11.07
  • A magnitude 5.3 earthquake in Lisbon

  • I awoke at 5:11 a.m. on August 26.
    I’m a late sleeper, so I typically would have never been awake before the sun, but this day was different. My animal instincts must have kicked in, because I felt the shaking start just as I awoke feeling that something wasn’t right.
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  • 2024.09.17
  • Snails and the summer festival

  • The village festival where I live in Monte Bom is held on August 15. The Catholics celebrate this day as the Assumption of Mary, so it’s a holiday in Portugal. To make things more complicated, the patron saint of Monte Bom is Nossa Senhora da Conceição (Our Lady of the Conception), but we still do our festival on the same day.
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  • 2024.09.03
  • Attitudes towards nudity

  • Did you know there is an event where you walk outside in nature at night wearing nothing at all?
    It’s called the Night Tourist Walk, and it’s sponsored by a nudist club.
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  • 2024.06.20
  • The Funchal Flower Festival

  • Madeira is a chain of Portuguese islands renowned for its natural beauty.
    This volcanic archipelago is made up of the populated Madeira Island, the uninhabited Desertas, Porto Santo (known for its emerald waters and ochre-sand beaches), and the Savage Islands. Funchas in Madeira Island is the capital.
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  • 2024.03.22
  • Crossing the Strait of Gibraltar in search of a dragon (Part II)

  • My mission to find a dragon felt like it failed right out of the gate. My desire for the unknown land of Morocco to be as mysterious and otherworldly as the Arabian Nights was a childish fantasy, and I was immediately snapped out of a naïve wish for my experiences there to amount to some “Desert Dragon” tale.
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  • Megumi Ota
  • 2024.01.15
  • The Mercado de Mafra
  • Every town in Portugal has a central marketplace, something like what we would call a local farmer’s market today. They can be any size, but you’ll always have greengrocers, fishmongers, butchers, and florists there.
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  • Megumi Ota
  • 2023.11.28
  • The white ghost
  • A pure white eel appeared in the south of Portugal at Porto Covo. Normally, this cousin of the moray eel is native to the western Pacific, the western Indian Ocean, and the Ryukyu Islands.
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  • 2023.10.26
  • The harvest moon
  • Japan’s Mid-Autumn Festival fell on the actual day of the full moon this year, so it got a lot of attention back home.
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  • 2023.06.26
  • Zero sales tax (VAT)
  • One of the big changes this year is that everything’s gotten more expensive.
    Gas, electricity, food… all things people need to survive.
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  • Portugal Santo_isidoro
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  • 2023.05.11
  • Portuguese gourmet
  • In this continuation of my last post, we visit the 2022 world pasty rankings.And whaddya know! Portugal’s Pastel de Belém has the top spot. The second-place rank also goes to a Portuguese pastry, Pastel de Nata. These pastries are known in Japan as “egg tarts.”
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  • 2023.03.01
  • Traditional Portuguese cuisine
  • I recently came across a top-100 ranking of the Best Traditional Food in the World (https://www.tasteatlas.com/best) that a cooking site called Taste Atlas posted for 2022.
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  • 2023.02.15
  • A Portuguese swimmer and atomic bomb survivor
  • Yokochi Shintaro was a Portuguese swimming coach who led his son, Alexandre Yokochi, to the Olympic finals. No doubt he was the most famous Japanese person living in Portugal and one of the most important figures in Portuguese sports.
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  • Megumi Ota
  • 2022.11.25
  • Pão por Deus
  • Dia de Todos-os-Santos (All Saints’ Day) is a holiday that pays homage to all of the martyrs and other saints. The following day, known as Dia de Finados or Dia dos Mortos (The Day of the Dead), is a day when people pray for the souls of the deceased.
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  • 2022.10.31
  • The Borda d’Água
  • Borda d’Água, which translates to “edge of the water,” is a booklet full of everyday wisdom based on astronomical and religious data. It’s published every year, and 2022 already marks its 93rd printing!
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  • Megumi Ota
  • 2022.05.20
  • Going cashless
  • On my recent trip to Japan, I found myself disappointed with something: the vending machines. They’re all over the place there, which is always fun.
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  • 2022.04.14
  • Hit by omicron (Part III)
  • With all the media outlets focusing on Russia and Ukraine, coronavirus news seems to have disappeared. Of course, people are still getting infected and dying from it, but they’re no longer being forced to get PCR or antigen tests to travel, and restrictions on everyday life have eased.
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  • 2022.03.02
  • Hit by omicron (Part II)
  • Everything I told you about in my last post still wasn’t the end of our battle with omicron. Despite everything that was going on, we decided to make a hasty trip back to Japan. This was before the omicron variant was announced.
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  • 2021.07.15
  • Summer research project
  • The pandemic just keeps raging on here. When will it all end? The lockdowns in Portugal did their job, putting us on the covid green list and causing travelers from all over Europe to flood in—which may be the reason that covid cases are suddenly on the rise here again.
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  • 2021.05.19
  • The case of missing Juliana
  • Is it curtains for Juliana now, too?At the bottom of the stairs was a stain that looked like beet juice, with a dotted line of crimson drops leading away from it.It could only be one thing: Juliana’s blood.
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  • 2021.03.30
  • March 11
  • March 11, 2011. The date of the Great East Japan Earthquake. It’s a day that will be etched in the memory of every Japanese person forever. Even in Portugal, where news of Asia is scarce, scenes of the disaster were shown everywhere.
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  • 2021.03.04
  • A second lockdown
  • We’ve had increasingly strict emergency restrictions due to the pandemic since January, and each time they get more complicated—both in wording and content. Put simply though, we’re back to lockdown.
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  • 2021.02.05
  • Designer humans
  • Technology is advancing at a blinding pace. We live in a world that people could not have even imagined just a century ago. Meanwhile, there’s been a dizzying explosion of basic knowledge.
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  • 2020.12.09
  • St. Martin’s Day
  • November 11 is the Day of Saint Martin, or São Martinho in Portuguese. It heralds the transition of summer into fall, complete with the smells of roasting chestnuts.
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  • 2020.05.20
  • COVID-19
  • Here’s another post on the novel coronavirus. Far from calming down, the virus only continues to spread—and not a day goes by where you don’t see COVID-19 all over the news. I’m even getting COVID-19 warnings sent to my phone all the time.
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  • 2020.02.19
  • The overprotective era
  • As families become more nuclear and have less children in recent years, we’re seeing parents that are increasingly overprotective and intrusive in their kids’ lives.
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  • 2020.01.21
  • Taking stock of 2019 and looking ahead to 2020
  • Two thousand nineteen. It was such a busy year that I hardly had a moment to spare. It wasn’t that I was flat-out with work, necessarily, but the projects I was doing were really diverse and I had some failures taking on new challenges—to the point that it brought me to tears a few times.
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  • 2019.12.26
  • Mafra palace
  • The palace and convent at Mafra, the city I live in, was recognized as a UNESCO World Heritage Site this year. This was probably the biggest news of the year for the city.
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  • 2019.11.11
  • Japanese Paper and its Possibilities
  • Although I did notice the "50th Anniversary of the Tokushima-Leiria Sister City Relationship" in the monthly Ambassador’s Newsletter put out by the Embassy of Portugal, I didn't really pay much attention to it.
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  • 2019.10.11
  • Meatless meat dishes
  • Greta Thunberg is a sixteen-year-old Swedish girl who is making headlines in Portugal. She is an environmental activist who spent nearly two weeks making a transatlantic crossing to speak at the United Nations.
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  • 2019.09.13
  • AURA SINTRA 2019
  • People who are blind from birth are probably able to sense light, but can they distinguish color or kinds of light? Not to mention the shadows that light can create—how would they be able to perceive those?
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  • 2019.07.04
  • Information selection and grief care
  • Right now in Japan, the unsettling news stories just keep coming.Among them was the particularly shocking incident in Kawasaki City’s Noborito district where a number of boys and girls who are students of Caritas Gakuen were stabbed one after another.
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  • 2019.05.28
  • Surf Mecca
  • Did you know that the coast of Portugal is said to be perfect for surfing? The beach in the area where I live is especially famous as a Surf Mecca that attracts surfers from all over the world.
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  • 2019.04.24
  • Plastic Planet
  • Did you know that some people say there will be more plastic in the oceans than there are fish by around the year 2050? A few weeks ago, the carcass of a sperm whale washed ashore on the Italian island of Sardinia. Opening the whale's belly, they found an already-deceased fetus and a massive amount of plastic. That plastic totaled 22 kilograms.
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  • 2019.03.20
  • What Will Happen to Britons Living in Portugal?
  • Will the UK leave the EU at the end of March? In most places in London in the 1990s, the majority of people were, naturally, Britons. You could hear beautiful British English wherever you went. As for immigrants, they had come from former colonies such as India.
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  • 2019.01.22
  • Los Reyes Magos
  • The Portuguese celebrated Dia dos Reis (Three Kings’ Day) on January 6. It’s not a public holiday, but it’s a huge holiday in the Spanish-speaking world, where they call it Los Reyes Magos and start celebrating the night before, on January 5.
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  • 2018.12.19
  • Christmas Madness
  • Christmas is coming… La la li la la… Oh no! I can't bear the dreamy trance. Particularly for parents with children, it's a time when just hearing the word "Christmas" puts you on edge. No, it’s not a pleasant.
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  • 2018.11.27
  • Woolen Socks
  • Recently I went to Mezio, in the Serra da Estrela region.My goal was to visit a folk craft shop in a place called Montemuro.The shop has all sorts of things: herbs, spices, baskets, embroidery, patchwork, hemp products, and so on, but what attracted my interest on this trip was the sheep’s wool products.
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  • 2018.10.26
  • No War!
  • The other day a special presentation was given at the supplementary Japanese language school my children go to on Saturdays by 3 A-bomb Legacy Successors, with the assistance of the Nagasaki National Peace Memorial Hall for the Atomic Bomb Victims.
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  • 2018.10.03
  • Cristiano Ronaldo Airport
  • The FIFA World Cup was held this year. Japan’s team, commonly called Samurai Japan, gave a promising performance and brought cheer to the people of Japan. It seemed they might win the match against Belgium, but in the end they did not, which was very regretful. All the same, the players that were worthy of their name, Samurai, were able to show the world their strong spirit.
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  • 2018.08.30
  • Japanese Gods and Nature
  • I am back in Japan for a little while at the moment.My arrival back in Japan was about 2 weeks after an earthquake in the north of Osaka prefecture with a seismic intensity of lower 6. Since I got back, heavy rain has continued falling and there have been landslides. A typhoon directly hit Japan and a record-breaking heatwave hasn't let up. What on earth is happening to Japan?!
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  • 2018.07.25
  • Monster of Nazaré
  • Have you heard of monster waves? As it sounds, a monster wave is monstrous, many tens of meters high.Such waves occur at Nazaré, Portugal.
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  • 2018.06.26
  • The Sardine Festival
  • The Feast of St. Anthony is a festival held on June 12th in Lisbon. It’s also known as the Sardine Festival by the Japanese. As the name says, sardines are grilled here and there in the old district of Lisbon. It’s a day when Lisbon is enveloped in the aroma of sardines.
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  • 2018.05.31
  • Dinosaur Fever
  • Portugal is quietly experiencing a dinosaur boom.Dinosaurs have become so popular there isn't a single boy who doesn't like them.Among them is my son, a huge fan who has consequently become a reptile enthusiast. So, he is sure that lizards and so on are small present-day dinosaurs.
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  • 2018.04.24
  • Easter Bread
  • Around the time the cherry blossoms start blooming in Japan, we have Easter vacation here. Chocolate Easter eggs and colorful egg-themed sugar confectionery begin appearing in shop fronts giving them a lively feel.
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  • 2018.03.23
  • Sculpture Preservation and Restoration 2
  • I wrote in a previous blog about restoring sculptures in Igreja Martiz de Arcos de Valdevez, a church in Portugal's north. In this blog, I'd like to carry on with that story, this time starting with the actual cleaning of the sculptures.
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  • 2018.01.05
  • Harvest festival
  • Beaujolais Nouveau Day—the day the new crop of Beaujolais goes on sale—made headlines as a big event even in Japan this year. The entire country of Portugal was also celebrating the (grape) harvest around the same time.
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  • 2017.12.17
  • Places full of books
  • When it gets to be early summer in Portugal, different parts of the country start hosting book fairs. They typically involve street stalls lined up in a big park, but you’ll sometimes see them set up a massive white tent right along the shoreline.
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  • 2017.11.15
  • Halloween in Portugal
  • November 1 is a festival day called Dia de Todos-os-Santos. Although the literal translation of Dia de Todos-os-Santos is “All Saints Day,” it’s not a day for the saints but a day to pray for the faithful who have passed away. Or perhaps calling it by the Japanese name “Obon,” or even “Halloween” makes it easier to understand.
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  • 2017.10.20
  • Basic Income
  • Last week the 17th BIEN Congress was held at the Assembly of the Republic in Lisbon. “BIEN” stands for Basic Income Earth Network, a group that researches and promotes the idea of a basic income.
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  • 2017.09.19
  • A Cup of Coffee
  • If you order café (coffee) in Portugal, you will receive what is called espresso coffee in Japan.It costs no more than 100 yen, and swallowing the fragrant dark brown liquid in one gulp kicks off your day.
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  • 2017.09.05
  • We have snails today!
  • During the late spring and early summer, you start to see signs posted at the entrance to cafés or on the counter next to the coffee machines. They’re just regular letter-sized pieces of paper with the phrase “Há Caracois!” written on them. Sometimes they’re accompanied by a drawing of a snail. The signs are saying that the café has snails available.
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  • 2017.06.14
  • The Miracle of Fátima
  • May 13 of this year marked the hundredth anniversaries of the apparitions of Our Lady of Fátima. To celebrate, Pope Francis journeyed all the way from Rome to the Sanctuary of Fátima to offer his prayers.
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