It's quiet in the early morning as I speed through a landscape of wildflowers, sheep, cattle and not much else, heading east from Lisbon along the road to 'nowhere'.
Nowhere is a disparaging term Portuguese use to describe the country's least developed, least populated region, covering about a third of Portugal south from the Tagus River to the mountains of northern Algarve, and east from Lisbon to the Spanish border.
The Alentejo, its proper name, has been traditionally cast as a land of bread and bad wine, a place of little industry where farmers have toiled for centuries growing wheat and sunflowers and raising sheep, cattle, pigs and goats while relying on the poorer soil for olives, cork oak trees and vineyards. But it's an undervalued destination on any Portuguese road trip.
Off the highways, lesser roads lead to the old Portugal I remember seeing in National Geographic as a child: a bullock-drawn plough, the occasional ox-cart and women dressed in black working in neatly tended olive groves. Beautiful in its simplicity.
Rolling green plains stretch to the horizon and gnarled cork oak trees twist up out of the dust of wheat fields and anywhere else there is space to grow. Springtime introduces a broad canvas of colours to vast meadows of lavender, poppies, calendulas, daisies and buttercups, an Impressionist scene redolent of Claude Monet.
In the middle is Igrejinha, a little gem of a town full of whitewashed buildings with vividly coloured trim and red-tiled roofs typical of towns across the region. I stop to admire its sleepy streets, gleaming white shops, houses with carved, bright blue doors and inlaid traditional azulejos painted ceramic tiles.