Category: Portugal

Yes, another festival.  They seem to have followed us from Spain.  And not to be outdone by the Spanish, Porto’s Sao Joao is the whole month of June.  So, what is this you ask? It’s a festival celebrating St. John the Baptiste in Porto and Porto only it seems.  The event, dating back some 600 years seems to have a lot of pagan roots but according to Wiki, the St. John part was only integrated in the 19th century.  It has since become the most important celebration of the year in Porto.  It’s said that it is one of the liveliest street festivals in the country although not many people…

So, we did a bike ride along the south shore route all the way down to the Capela do Senhor da Pedra, an old stone chapel which is perched on a giant boulder stuck out into the ocean. The chapel was constructed in 1686 to ensure the dominance of Christianity over the superstitious local population. Originally, this precarious location was the site of ancient pagan worship where rituals were once performed and today neopagans continue to make an annual pilgrimage to this sacred site. It was a nice hot day and the ride there and back was about 40km.  Very pleasant, but we were tired at the end.  Portugal’s coast…

Porto, home of the Franceschina.  (That would be one of these…) It’s nice to be back!   We haven’t posted for a while and are winding down at our last stop for this year.  We stayed for 3 nights in Seville between Ronda and Porto and checked out the Triana side of town which we enjoyed but, it was 40 degrees when we got there and 38 when we left.  Way too HOT!!!   Porto is much cooler and we like it …a LOT.  We’ve been here for a little over 2 weeks now with 2 more to go.  The airBnB overlooks both the Duoro river and the Atlantic and we’re…

Lagos is located at the western end of the Algarve and much more rugged geography-wise than Tavira where we were last year.  The coastline, with its long sandy beaches has some spectacular cliffs, coves, and high waves. Lagos’ history goes back a couple of thousand years to the Celts and the Carthaginians and later was home to Henry the Navigator.  It was at one point, so I’m told, the center of the European slave trade.  Now it’s just a top vacation destination spot.  You’d think that with all that activity over the centuries combined with the beautiful location and nice weather, Lagos would be a big city on the Ocean,…

The time is almost up.  Three weeks have gone by quickly but, there’s always next year. Most of the photos we’ve taken are of the street kind; glimpses of people and day to day activity.  Lisbon’s very laid back and with the weather being endless days of blue sky and sunshine, it made it easy to walkabout and point the camera. We walked to the LxFactory market one day.  That was a 17km hike so good thing we are in reasonable shape.  It’s an old run-down factory district which now houses trendy IT offices for the working millennials.  On Sunday’s there’s a market and a whole lot of food joints. …

    So, we broke down and did the touristo thing.  We took a walking tour of Porto on our last day.  Just what we needed right?  More walking?  The WORST tour started at a park filled with homeless people and went downhill from there. OK, so now that we have your attention, it was, in all honesty, a GREAT walking tour!  It’s just called Worst Tours.  Weird name, so here’s the deal, verbatim from their brochure. Three architects facing sudden economic destruction refuse leaving town and imagine the least likely walking tours.  Porto, the big picture, good and bad architecture, ‘Tascas’, politics, alleys, tiny associations, abandoned buildings, and great…

    As I mentioned, many tourists here, a lot more than we had expected. I seem to recall a few internet vacation sites recommending Porto as the number 1 destination place this year.  I guess everyone took that to heart.  It really is a great place to visit but we haven’t exactly done a whole lot here other than just poke around. There’s the usual things to see of course, fortifications, monasteries, and old churches but there’s also interesting geography and culture here.  The city hills wind down to the river docks south and to the Ocean on the west.  The old houses built on top of one another…

Porto is, how can I best say this, really, really nice.  At least for us.  It has a great feel, it’s not as big or hectic as Lisbon, and it’s very pretty.  Being an old working-class port town, it has some rough areas, but it looks like for the past 5 or 6 years there has been a rebuild and an attempt at reinventing itself.  It’s being gentrified as we say; many old places in various stages of renovation, lots of modern stores and malls next to derelict buildings, and hordes of tourists wandering around.  There is a good energy feeling here. Porto is about 3 hours train ride north…

or One Million Reasons Why You Should Not Swim in the Ocean For our last day here in Lisbon we decided to…surprise…go for a walk.  This time we went in the opposite direction from the Lisbon center and headed out for a 7 km walk to the old 1998 expo site and plaza of nations.  After the 12 km walk earlier when we explored Belem, this was easy peasy and a nice stroll along the Tagus river the entire way.  The destination?  The Oceanário de Lisboa, once the largest, now 2nd largest indoor aquarium in Europe, behind the one in Valencia, Spain.     Built for the 1998 World Exposition,…