Alan Hayman is sceptical about returning to Portugal

A STATE of Calamity.

Those are not the words describing how my house looks after a family visit.

They are how the Portuguese are officially describing the state of their country after the Covid pandemic.

Seemingly ready to overlook that small issue, their hotels, bars and restaurants found time to put out the welcome mat for British tourists last week.

Vaccinated visitors with wallets full of Euros are clearly a tempting prospect for the country’s hard-hit tourist industry.

If you plan to visit the Algarve shortly, good luck with your trip.

But a word of warning - don’t expect much help from Portuguese officialdom if things go wrong for any reason.

My distrust of how they do things in Lisbon began in 2007, when four year-old Madeleine McCann disappeared on a family holiday at the beach resort of Praia da Luz.

The local version of Inspector Clouseau decided the prime suspects were Maddie’s distraught parents, Gerry and Kate McCann.

Faced with a storm of protest against that egregious blunder, Portugal belatedly promised to follow other lines of inquiry.

In particular, we were told an urgent search of cars and lorries would start on the land border with Spain.

The TV newsdesk where I worked sent a camera crew to see what that meant in reality.

They were massively underwhelmed by what they found.

Gazette contributor Alan Hayman

Their pictures showed a solitary frontier guard sitting in a wooden sentry-box, with a cigarette in one hand and a newspaper in the other.

A few yards away, a stream of traffic rolled by unchecked on the road to Spain.

Any of those vehicles might have taken Maddie and her abductor to another country.

Official Portugal clearly didn’t care.

The mystery of a British child’s disappearance was a British problem in their eyes.

So why not let the McCanns and Scotland Yard do the hard and costly work of properly investigating it?

Everyone hopes that another case like that will never happen again, in Portugal or anywhere else.

Holidaymakers disembarking from their London Gatwick flight

But there are few certainties in life and untoward events in Iberian resorts are not the only risks that UK travellers could run this summer.

There’s also flying home afterwards to join a long slow-moving queue in a torrid airport arrivals hall.

Waiting for hours in the terminal after an inbound flight is never a good experience.

If it also means breathing in other peoples’ exhaled Covid germs as well, is it worth the risk?

Perhaps Witham MP and Home Secretary Priti Patel will sort her Border Force staffing issues in time for the summer rush, but I somehow doubt it.

So where to go on holiday instead?

Our staycation this summer will be in a rented cottage in Yorkshire’s scenic Dentdale.

Passengers arrive at Faro airport, in Portugal's southern Algarve region

Packing a pair of moleskin trousers and a phrasebook full of colourful northern idioms, I expect to blend in seamlessly with the locals.

The trip won’t be cheap and sunshine is far from guaranteed, but my other half has friends in the north.

And above all, there’ll be no £200 or so in charges for private Covid tests and no Heathrow quarantine hotel room awaiting us at £1,750 a pop on our return.

Saving cash on that scale might pay for a great foreign holiday when things are truly normal again. Who knows?

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