After our scary experience in our Portovenere apartment we changed our plans slightly and headed to Santa Margherita, a village we knew we loved. This busy seaside village is characterised by pastel coloured buildings with frescoes of windows, doors and other features painted on them. This makes the town centre look like a Hollywood film set. You feel that the buildings are just empty facades. The streets are lined with specialty food stores, bakeries selling beautiful focaccia, and ports overflowing with fresh fish and seafood. After a short initial hotel stay we were lucky to find a villa to rent with a huge garden. This truly felt like home for us. The house was a 15 minute walk from town, set a little up the hill with views between the palms toward the sea. We made ourselves at home, cooking, eating outdoors for breakfast lunch and dinner. It was wonderful making the trek in daily to the fruit and vegetable markets where local growers set up their own table for the morning, and then meeting the fisherman at the seaside daily at 4pm to see what they'd caught and select our night's dinner.
We often walked from Santa Margherita to Portofino and we also cycled there, on the busy narrow road along with plenty of motorbikes and buses. We had a boat trip to the gorgeous San Fruttuoso where we snorkelled over the sunken statue of Madonna, 18m deep. I also hiked from Santa Margherita to Camogli and Portofino to San Fruttuoso through the Portofino National Park. These were pretty steep but a great way to see the area from all different angles.
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