Lisbon - the halfway point

We have been going now for two weeks so this is the half way point of our four week tour of Morocco, Spain, and Portugal. On the bright side we still have another 6 weeks to go on our holiday though!

Today was spent looking around Lisbon. Our local guide took us to the area called Belém which is on the western side of Lisbon and on the river Tagus. Belém actually means Bethlehem in Portuguese and is the site of a 16th century former monastery dedicated to St Jerome.

This place is huge! It hasn’t been a monastery since 1833 when it was taken over by the State so now it is still a functioning church and tourist attraction.

Being right on the river it was often the last place sailors could attend mass and confession before sailing away. It was also quite a dangerous place as anyone sailing past looking for a fight would come across the monastery.

Brief history lesson. The golden age of discovery was in the 15th and 16th centuries when sailors were pushing back the boundaries of the known world. Slowly sailing down the west coast and up the east coast of Africa, in 1488 Vasco de Gama reach Goa in India, by 1543 they had reached Japan (the Japanese word for thank you is aragato the Portuguese word is abrogato). They also sailed across the Atlantic to Brazil in 1500.

The oldest treaty between nations that is still in place is the Anglo-Portuguese treaty signed in 1373. Britain and Portugal frequently worked together as Britain had the military muscle (ie the most powerful navy) and Portugal had the know-how to navigate so together they could really dominate. Portugal had loads of African colonies (including Mozambique and Angola), South American colonies like Brazil, as well as colonies in India (Goa), and Asia (Timor and Macau) the last colony Macau was handed back to China in 1999.

We couldn’t go into the church as it was Sunday and mass was happening but we could get into the cloisters. The stonework and carving was stunning with a focus on religious and maritime icons.

One of the really big things the monastery is famous for is this is where the Portuguese tart was invented. One story was that the monks used egg whiles to starch their habits so they had to find a use for the egg yolks hence inventing the tart. Anyway these things are everywhere. Even our hotel breakfast buffet had a big plate of tarts available and they are in pastry shops all over town. The original cafe where they were first sold is called Pasteris de Belém which opened in 1837, and yes they were excellent!

We then headed across the rail line to the Monument of the Discoveries. This was built in the 1950s to commemorate Portugal’s maritime history. It has statues of various explorers including Henry the Navigator and Vasco de Gama.

We then headed into the main part of town where our guide gave us a bit of an explanation of where the key things were and we were left with a free afternoon. We had a light lunch in a very old cafe before walking around a doing a bit of shopping.

We braved the Lisbon metro to get back to the hotel - actually very simple and very convenient.

Tonight Trace and I booked to go to a small Portuguese restaurant for dinner and a Fado show. Fado is Portuguese folk music and suffice to say this was a definite highlight of the trip so far.

It was a very small two-room restaurant with an archway between the rooms. The set menu was typical Portuguese home cooked food and the set price included drinks. There were multiple dishes including olives, mushrooms, grilled capsicum, veggie soup, cod & spinach, with slow cooked veal for mains and chocolate cake for dessert. Seriously good and the Portuguese rose wine was also excellent.

The music was supplied by two guitarists, one on a 12-string Portuguese guitar and the other on a typical acoustic guitar. No amplifiers or microphones. There were a few singers both male and female and while we had no idea what they were singing about it was really fantastic. They each sang a set of 4 or 5 songs between courses.

We caught the metro home getting back to the hotel around 1am - very late!Weiterlesen