Paul McCartney in the Algarve and the birth of "Yesterday"

There are stories that seem born of chance and reveal how the memory of a place intertwines with artistic creation. Paul McCartney, then a young Beatle, found in the Algarve an unexpected setting to shape what would become one of the most celebrated songs in the history of popular music. The melody of Yesterday came to him in a dream and stayed with him for days. He was missing the words and it was in southern Portugal, in 1965, that he began to give them form.

McCartney was staying in Albufeira, at the home of his friend Bruce Welch, guitarist of the Shadows. The serene atmosphere, between beaches still untouched by mass tourism and the quiet of a luminous summer, helped him move forward in the creative process. There, in the silence broken only by the sea, he began to shape the first lines of a song that would become a landmark.

No known photographs exist of Paul McCartney in the Algarve. This absence of visual records fed the imagination and heightened the aura of mystery surrounding his time in the region. Curiously, a hotel in the Algarve even offered free lifetime accommodation to anyone who could produce an authentic photograph of McCartney from those days. The challenge went unmet, adding even more charm to the story.

What remains is oral memory, the testimonies of those who shared his discreet presence and the certainty that the Algarve, still sheltered from cosmopolitan bustle, gave Paul McCartney a space of intimacy and inspiration. The simplicity of whitewashed houses, the warmth of human presence and the rhythm of the waves formed the backdrop for a moment that would change the history of music.

Yesterday, a song of timeless beauty, thus carries within its DNA a Portuguese fragment. There may be no photographic proof, but there is an atmosphere that time cannot erase. The Algarve, with its unique light, was the place where Paul McCartney’s imagination found form and voice.

Paulo Freitas do AmaralProfessor, Historian and Author