Cleaning the car this morning (it was becoming a disgusting shade of yellow rather than it's usual white) we spotted on the neighbour's wall hundreds of little black dots. Amazed, these were hundreds upon hundreds of caracóis, snails: on the wall, on the plants, everywhere.
Like in France, and I believe in Spain, caracóis are a Portuguese delicacy, and are eaten by the plate-load, in café's and restaurants across the country. Outside the shop, there will be a poorly printed, or hand-written sign "Há Caracóis," "we have snails" (or more precisely, "there are snails"). Now these aren't the beautiful, hand-reared, French snails, cooked in a beautiful garlic butter and served with a fine wine, but small wild snails, soaked in salt water, boiled and eaten either with a beer, or with the poorest glass of 50c wine that is available.
Personally, I can do without them, they are far too bland, and if not prepared properly contain 'coco', which is basically a mixture of snail crap and earth inside the shell. As you can probably guess, when first eating these, I also ate the coco, which is a bit lumpy and hard, and not very nice. So my opinion is biased.
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