Portugal

This Easter, after not travelling for a few months, Marina and I started to feel a little stir crazy. We scratched our heads a bit about where we wanted to go, but ultimately we decided on Portugal. The whole country you ask? Well… no. We didn’t visit Faro or the islands, but we did spend some time in Porto and Lisbon and a few towns in between the two.

We started our trip in Porto, the country’s second largest city, not knowing what to expect – thankfully we were pleasantly surprised! The city is famous for its port wine, named after the city and not the other way around, which is a fortified desert wine, meaning brandy is added during the production process to cease the fermentation process. The city of Porto made much of its fortune on the wine, beginning with trading with the English who promptly took over most of the industry- bloody imperialists, starting as early as the 13th century and lasting right through to today.

Marina booked a nice hotel on the river, on the Porto side, with a view of Vila Nova de Gaia and its port wine aging warehouses. Here is a photo of our hotel and one of the views westward from our balcony.

Here Marina poses in front of some port wine aging barrels during our tour of a wine warehouse.

Here are some random churches- in addition to wine, it seems the city was big in the Jesus business. We climbed to the top of the tower of the one church and were blessed – pardon – with a great view of the city. (sacrilege Scott, sacrilege)

Here I am sitting in front of the Dom Luis bridge and some of the old port wine transport boats which are now only used as decorations.




This is a view of Porto from the Dom Luis bridge -designed by a student of Gustave Eiffel.



This is an eastward view from our hotel balcony of the Dom Luis bridge and the monastery. Nice huh?!

In order to stick to our itinerary it was time to leave Porto, so we rented a car in the morning and started to make our way down the coast. Here is a light house at our first pit stop

We eventually made our way to Obidos, a small picturesque village. Unfortunately, it was raining at the time so we don’t have many pictures from our stop there.





On our way to Nazare, a beach town about half way between Porto and Lisbon, we made a wrong turn and ended up at Pedro do Guilham. It turned out ok because we got out for a look around and saw this nice church, and after looking over the cliff we saw Nazare down below!


Near the end of our day, and right outside Lisbon, we stopped at the town of Sintra. It was a pretty little town and apparently draws big tourist crowds, but as it was late in the evening I don’t have any good pictures. Dang!

Eventually we made it to Lisbon, the biggest city in Portugal. While I enjoyed Lisbon it was a bit of a let down after the charming towns before. Here are the Lisbon photo’s!

Nice hair Scott!