♥ by Eva
We’re coming from countries, Germany and France respectively, where if you want to buy organic, you’re rather spoiled for choice. And the trend is luckily growing every day. You can find everything there from more basic and affordable bio supermarkets to very fancy, more expensive bio shops offering also nutritional supplements and alternative medicines and cosmetics.
Generally, we buy everything organic because we believe it’s the way to go to maintain our environment/planet, mostly avoid pesticides and genetically-manipulated food and buy high-quality products. After all, you are what you eat. And when it comes to cosmetics, the skin being our body’s biggest organ, I like to use only products that I wouldn’t mind eating (and plant-based soap for the hands).
In Spain and Portugal, it’s been a bit more difficult to find organic shops. There’s usually an isle with organic products in the hypermarkets, but the choice is limited, the quality is lower and it’s almost as expensive as in the small shops. Organic fruit and veg is almost non-existent in hypermarkets. We use Maps to find bio shops in the bigger cities, and that works quite well. The prices are almost as high as at home, though, because many products are imported from France, Germany and Spain. We find it a bit strange to see that a country like Portugal which is growing a wide range of food, isn’t growing a lot of organic fruit & veg. At the same time, things are changing here, so I hope that organic food will become more of a normality and accessible to all.
In this post I’d like to particularly recommend an organic shop in Coimbra – La Bioescolha. It offers a nice range of products, prices are rather cheap and the staff is really friendly and helpful. You can also eat there (really tasty and healthy lunch menu with starter, main dish and coffee for 8,90€). The food is organic, of course; the portions are generous; it’s fashionably furnished; the lunch menu is freshly prepared and vegetarian/vegan, and there are also various frozen lasagnas and pizzas on offer (I tried the cheese and walnut lasagna and it was delicious).
If you’re in Coimbra and you’re looking for a place to have organic lunch, I can fully recommend this place! And when you’re done (or before you eat) you can do some groceries, too!
The Faraway Folks 
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