Lisbon, Like It!!

No we are not in San Fran, this is Lisbon

Arrived in Lisbon, the capital of Portugal, at about 2-00pm this afternoon and immediately picked up our local tour guide who gave us a bus tour around the city after first showing us through the Cathedral of St Jeronimos, which is pretty impressive.

Cathedral of St Jeronimos

Inside Cloisters of Cathedral

Portgual, back in the day was a very wealthy country, mainly as a result of a number of Portugese like Vasco Da Gama the 15th century explorer finding new worlds and opening up the country to new opportunities and wealth. The wealth that funded those initial expeditions came from the crusades and then the confiscation of wealth from the church. You can sense that wealth and the prestige that it bought to the country in the city today 

More Cloister

Monument to the Explorers

Group Coffee break 

In 1755 however, an 8.5 - 9.0 magnitude earthquake and tsunami hit Portugal with devastating results, fires and up to 100,000 lost. This event had a major impact of Portugal's colonial aspirations and much of Lisbon had to be rebuilt, during the 18th and 19th centuries. So most of the buildings are of that period.

We are staying in an amazing hotel, by the way, called the Pestana Place Hotel. I will post some photos tomorrow.

Pestana Place Hotel

Reception

Thursday 12th Sept and as promised here a a couple of photos of the hotel.

Hotel Gardens

We left the Hotel today at 8-30am and headed to the town of Sintara, that has a 17th Century castle built into a rock hillside.

Castle 1

Castle 2

Inside Castle

Castle wall

Down in the town

Little Streets in the town

Lisbon town square

Today is Friday the 13th Sept and it is our final day in Lisbon. We had a "free" day today so we spent the day walking around the city. Left the hotel at 10-00am this morning and got back at 6-00pm. I was good to get back and have a good days walk, as a lot of the time is either spent on the bus, or with the group visiting places.

Concrete beach, imagine that at end of Queen St

Nice parks

The hotel is located about 5km from the city centre, down the harbor a little so it was a reasonable walk just to get there and back :-). It was also nice to was alongside the waters edge for some of the way, even though it was mainly commercial dockland. This image above is a "concrete" beach, pretty close to the city centre. Beats a stone wall or commercial wharves.

monuments

Had a good look around the city, Lisbon is a little "tired" as is the rest of Portugal, but you can sense there has been wealth here in the past, gained by "one means or another".

and vistas

Tomorrow we are off to Porto, the second largest city in Portugal. We spend the day driving north, some of that time along the coast so that will be nice to see the water again, missing the waterfront!!

City street