Dave & I have travelled alot and love sunshine, holidays and the vibe of surf-towns. Did I tell you we love sunshine? Well being able to have all of our friends together for a few days in the sunshine was priority number one in choosing a wedding location. We also didn't want our
wedding in a typical hotel function room, it's not that we're above it, we just like something a little different. So getting married in Ireland, though we did look at it, it was hard to tick all of the boxes, especially on the weather front. We then started looking at locations in Spain, as I speak Spanish I would have loved to use the opportunity to use it more and there was an area in Spain called the Costa de la Luz, which we had previously visited and loved. The big stickler here was that finding a good location, good accommodation and not forcing people only travelling for a few days to drive for more than a few hours once they landed, was proving difficult.
So our good friend Daire whose opinion we trusted, had previously lived in northern Portugal working for Jameson. He always sang the praises of the coast between Lisbon & Porto. We didn't really want to head for the Algarve as we wanted something more Portuguese than a commercial tourist resort. There were direct flights from Cork & Dublin to Lisbon, so when Daire mentioned Ericeira, it seemed to tick alot of boxes.
A few hours of Google searches later, I came across the Quinta de SantAna in Gradil, only 30 mins from Ericeira. I got in touch with the owner, Ann Frost and she seemed to be on our wave-length immediately. Ann is an amazing woman who runs all of the events at the Quinta, has 7 sons under the age of 20 and her lovely husband James runs the vineyard at the Quinta. The images & descriptions we got from her got us very excited so after a little to-ing & fro-ing of emails, we were pretty sure we had found the right spot. So in February, Dave & I hopped on a plane out to Lisbon and went to meet Ann at the Quinta. Even in the early spring sunshine of February we knew we were in the right place. The Quinta was absolutely amazing, Ann seemed to anticipate and gauge exactly the type of vibe we were going f
or with the wedding; rustic vineyard wedding meets festival fun.
So that's why we choose Ericeira & Gradil. On that same trip, Dave & I checked out all the hotels in town and were looking for somewhere to hold a BBQ the day after the wedding. We felt that if people were going to the bother of travelling to Portugal on our behalf, we should at least host them for two days. Walking along the promenade one day we saw a collection of houses on the waterfront that looked like a cross between a Disney film-set for Hansel & Grettel and something Gaudi had designed. Bingo! Here was a collection of houses within walking distance of town but right on the beach with a beautiful pool which we booked out for all of our friends to use the week of the wedding. We kept pinching ourselves that it was all working out too well and were very excited about the surprise people would get when they saw it all.
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