We weren’t quite sure Rita was ready for a walking weekend trip after her back surgery and waited until late to make the final decision. By that time we didn’t get the best cut-rate airline fares but did find a good deal on an airline you probably never heard of, SN Brussels Airlines. They are the remnants of bankrupt Sabena Airlines with good fares from Brussels. When we arrived at the airport early Saturday morning we discovered that we were on a code sharing flight and our airline was really TAP which is Air Portugal (I don’t know what the “T” stands for).
After a 2 ½ hour flight and change of time zones we arrived in Lisbon about 8:30 am. Our Marriott Hotel was a short 15-minute ride from the airport and the staff let us check into our room early. By 10:00 am we were unpacked and hitting the pavement to the nearest metro stop. We started our walking tour at the Praca Marques de Pombal where praca is Portuguese for plaza. The plaza is really a big circle with a huge statue of the Marques de Pombal in the center of it. He was the ruler responsible for rebuilding Lisbon after the great earthquake of 1755, which nearly wiped out the city.
We started walking south on Avenue Liberdade, which is Lisbon’s Champs Elysees. The weather was mild and humid with overcast skies. The walk was gradually downhill but we became quite warm wearing our raincoats. It is a pretty avenue with wide sidewalks laid out in nice patterns in black and white stones. Each side of the avenue is covered in eucalypt trees intermixed with tall palm trees. It looked tropical with brightly blooming bougainvillea plants and other flowers. We made a short stop for an espresso coffee, which is called a bica, then continued walking.
We shortly arrived at the Praca dos Restauradores, a large square dedicated to the dead of the War of Restoration. This is the beginning of the quarter known as the Baixa. Several large plazas are closely located and we walked from one to the others. Each had large statues or fountains in the center of the plaza. We walked through an old building known as the Rossio Station. Then we walked past the National Theater into the Praca Dom Pedro IV, which is more commonly called the Rossio. After nearly having someone slip into the backpack I was carrying, we walked to the Praca da Figueira. Cafes, restaurants, shops and townhouses, many of which are totally faced with colored tiles, surround all these plazas.
We walked down the street named Rua das Portas de Santo Antao lined with seafood restaurants. We had lunch at the Casa do Alentejo restaurant, which had a beautiful, old patio and fountain in the middle of the building. I had codfish and Rita had dorade and we just had to have a bottle of Portuguese Mateus rose wine for old times sake. There was a time early in our marriage when we thought a bottle of Mateus was hot stuff. It was drinkable but barely.
After lunch we walked to the Elevador de Santa Justa, an eight story metal elevator built around 1900 by an apprentice of Eiffel who built the tower in Paris. At the top one walks up two more flights of narrow, circular stairs, which are quite scary, to the top level where a small café is located. There are good views of the Baixa district from the top. From here we walked south again on Rua Augusta to the Praca do Commercio, a large plaza on the river Tejo or Tagus in English. It began to rain lightly so we put up our umbrellas and walked into the Alfama district, the old Moorish city of Lisbon. We went into a few old churches and saw the historic Casa dos Bicos, built in 1523, on our way to cathedral Se, which is short for Sedes Episcopalis. The cathedral was nothing very special but the Gothic cloister in back was interesting because of recent excavations there. Signs pointed out pre-Roman houses, Roman houses and streets, and Moorish shops of a later period. While we were in the cathedral Se the rains came down harder.
We trudged on through the narrow streets and alleys of Alfama. Most of these were closed to car traffic and several were steps going uphill towards the Sao Jorge Castle. We had hoped to get to the castle but the rains came down very hard and looked as if they would remain that way all afternoon. Even though we had umbrellas (we had taken off our raincoats and put them in our backpack since it was too warm) we were getting wet as the wind picked up too. Since it was nearly 5:00 pm we decided to catch a taxi back to our hotel where we changed into dry clothes. We had a good dinner buffet in our hotel restaurant and at the end of the day we were surprised to find out we walked nine miles according to Rita’s pedometer. Also, since we rose at 4:00 am this morning, we thought we had enough and turned in early, exhausted.
Sunday, October 12 we set our alarm for 6:30 am because we signed up for a bus tour of the countryside west of Lisbon. It was also good to take a break from all the previous day’s walking and spend more time sitting in a bus. The tour bus picked us up at the hotel and took us to a central plaza where all the other tour buses met. There they assembled us according to language and we transferred to another bus where our guide, Anna, spoke to us in Spanish and English, as that was the composition of our group.
We headed to the town of Estoril, which is a nice town for the wealthy jet set of Portugal. We saw the casino, which apparently was important to the tour guide. The landscape of this area along the coast west of Lisbon looks very tropical, much like southern California. We drove by the Boca do Inferno or the Mouth of Hell, a rock formation on the oceanfront where waves make a loud noise in rough weather. Thankfully it was sunny and calm so we escaped the wrath of hell. We stopped in the small fishing village of Cascais where the quaint houses of the fishermen have been transformed into restaurants and pubs, which by their names, seemed to cater to the British tourists. We continued along the beautiful coast to Cabo da Roca, the westernmost point of the European continent (discounting Ireland, Iceland and other islands). Here our bus turned inland and uphill through pretty pine forests with the occasional super views of the ocean and coastline.
The small mountain range here is called the Serra de Sintra and the main village in the mountains is Sintra, a UNESCO World Heritage site. This was a favorite summer retreat for the kings of Portugal and the Moorish leaders before them. We stopped to tour one of the two main castles in the area called the National Palace. The main construction of this palace was in the late 14th century but it is on a site once occupied by the Moorish rulers in the 10th century. There are several noteworthy rooms in the palace and we thoroughly enjoyed the tour. When we finished we walked about the old town and stopped to purchase two small queijadas de Sintra, which are small cheese tarts spiced with cinnamon and a specialty of Sintra.
Next we drove further north to the palace of Mafra where we toured the rich, marbled basilica, started in 1717 and finished in 1730 on the king’s birthday. Finally we drove on to the pretty seaside village of Ericeira where we stopped for a late lunch. At the restaurant Poco we had a nice meal of caldo verde, Portugal’s most famous soup, fresh hake steaks, chips and salad along with a nice pitcher of white wine. Dessert was a nice walnut cake with coffee and then we had free time to roam the town or walk down to the beach or both if you hurried.
We continued our tour driving back towards Lisbon and stopped in the suburbs to tour the Queluz Palace. Built around 1747, this palace resembles the palace of Versailles in France but on a smaller scale - not too surprising since a French architect built it. Unfortunately, it appears that the government or whoever maintains this palace has run low on funding, as much of it appears in need of repair. The gardens, too, seemed to not be maintained very well. Still, it is an imposing palace and worth a visit. After this we returned to our hotel, ordered a room service meal and worked the Sunday crossword puzzle in the Herald-Tribune.
Monday we slept in and after breakfast took the metro to the Praca dos Restauradores. We had planned to take an incline trolley car called the Elevador do Gloria but it was out of order. So we walked up several flights of stairs to the hilltop districts called Bairro Alto and Chiado. We began at the 16th century Sao Roque church, plain on the outside but very ornate inside. We followed the recommended path in our guidebook, which took us by several pretty squares, old historic cafes and intricately tiled buildings. From Chiado we crossed the Baixa district back into Alfama where we again climbed many steps to the Castle Sao Jorge. We walked along the old city walls with great views of Lisbon. Within the old walls was the actual castle with more ramparts to climb – more steps. We descended to the church of Santa Luzia with its bougainvillea-clad terrace and stark white walls with contrasting blue tile mosaics. We wandered narrow back alleys and winding steps which all looked better in the sunshine than Saturday’s heavy rain. We had lunch at a nice outdoor café in Alfama called Lautasco. It was about this time that Rita and I both came to the same conclusion that the food was okay but seemed to be heavily salted. Portuguese cuisine is mainly based on seafood and, while good, won’t replace our favorites, which bounce around between French, Italian and Tex-Mex. We were a bit tired by now so we took a taxi back to the hotel for a short nap.
Refreshed, we took the metro again to the end of the line near the river Tejo. Here we caught a ferry across the river to Cocilhas for good views of Lisbon at sunset. Crossing the river we could see the large suspension bridge that reminds one of the Golden Gate. We returned to Lisbon again by ferry and after walking around the Baixa district a while we caught a taxi back to the hotel where we had a light snack.
Tuesday morning we had a room service breakfast, packed our bags and checked out of the hotel. We left our bags with the concierge, took the metro to Praca do Commercio where we caught a crowded tram to Belem. Today Belem is a suburb of Lisbon but in the 15th century it was the port town where the famous explorers of Portugal set sail on their voyages of discovery. In 1495 King Manuel I built two beautiful monuments that stand today as the outstanding sites to see in Belem, the Jeronimos monastery and the Torre de Belem or Belem tower.
We first walked to the Torre de Belem where we climbed to the top on the claustrophobic circular stairway. The tower was built as a fortress and was the starting point for the Portuguese explorers who set sail when Portugal was one of the world powers. Portuguese explorers such as Magellan, Vasco da Gama and Henry the Navigator sailed from Belem. Today Portugal is one of the poorer countries in the European Union and seems sort of third-worldly. But at its peak it had colonies in South America (Brazil), India (Goa), China (Macao) and Africa (Angola) and divided the world up with Spain.
From the Torre de Belem we walked a short distance to the Jeronimos monastery, built about the same time. One of the highlights of the monastery is the south portal of the church with intricate stone carvings. The other highlight is the beautiful cloister, one of the prettiest we have seen and we have seen many cloisters. The church has the tomb of Vasco da Gama along with the tombs of many of the Portuguese kings. Next we walked through the old town Belem and chose a restaurant from many on Rua Vieira Portuense. We sat outside under an umbrella and I wished I had on shorts instead of jeans, as it was quite warm and humid. After an okay lunch and Sagras beer we walked to the recommended Antiga Confeitaria de Belem, a shop that has been selling pastries since 1837. The building has loads of character and while we sat drinking our espressos and eating their special dish called pasties de Belem, they sold hundreds of these treats. The dish is fairly simple, a rich custard in a flaky pastry cup that most customers sprinkled both powdered sugar and cinnamon over before eating. We enjoyed them so much we bought a package of six to take back to Brussels.
It was getting late so we took a taxi back to the hotel, retrieved our bags and continued on to the airport. Our flight arrived back in Brussels about 11:00 pm and it was about midnight when we took the train from the airport to the central station and walked home. We had visited the southern Algarve region of Portugal in 1983 but this was our first trip to Lisbon. Portugal has much to offer and we highly recommend a visit.
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