Guimaraes and Alcobaca

18 May

Shower, breakfast and pictures with Roberto before we wheel our luggage from the hotel to the car-park and head south for Portugal. We have studied the route out of Santiago carefully and for once it's as simple as it looks. Within a few minutes we are on the motorway.

The Portuguese border is barely an hour away. There's no bureaucracy these days. A sign at the Minho river says you are now entering Portugal and that's it. As we cross the bridge my car clock and my smart-phone lose an hour, as if by divine command. We leave the tollroads and take a winding minor road through the hills towards our destination, Guimaraes.

Guimaraes is a World Heritage Site and is the European City of Culture 2012. We'd heard much about it although we'd never been there. The GPS led us around the outskirts of the city to our hotel. She - she's a she - was spot-on and we were grateful.

The hotel was smart - four stars. I'd booked a suite, which was very nice. Dressing gowns in the bathroom - not that we used them - and all sorts of fancy toiletries. The hotel brochure was in Portuguese and semi-impenetrable English. At least the Portuguese was understandable.

After dropping our bags, we walk 10 minutes down the avenue and past the park to the city's famous old quarter. It's not as big as the old quarters of the last half dozen cities we have visited but it's just as pretty. We make our way through the square and up the narrow roads to the castle and keep at the city's extremities.

In the castle a dozen young Portuguese are cleaning up after some kind of presentation earlier in the day. Actors, dressed in ancient military costume, are passing benches and chairs up the steps to the ramparts for storage.

I follow other tourists up the ramparts and am impressed to find Jones following in my wake. She is fearful of heights.

A German woman remarks in English to her companion that nowhere in Germany would the authorities permit tourists to make their way along castle ramparts with a 40ft drop. Here in Portugal, it is not uncommon. The old castle never featured protective railings and the Portuguese authorities do not see fit to install them now.

We make our way across a narrow wooden bridge into the keep in the centre of the castle.

Two flights of wooden stairs lead us to the upper floor, where a steep narrow wooden stair gives access to the roof of the keep.

Visitors climb and descend it slowly and with great care. We follow. The hardest part is squeezing through the tiny doorway at the top.

The views from the top make it worthwhile. Absolutely brilliant if rather heady.

Then down through the old city - past dozens of noisy students - to a modest kitchen restaurant that feeds us well and inexpensively.

19 May

The day dawns cloudy with a promise of rain. We walk a mile around to the base of the cable car - the Teleferico - that climbs to the summit of the hill overlooking Guimaraes. We arrive at 10, just as it opens. The cable runs 1.7kms, climbing several hundred metres in the process.

Beneath us are vast "eccentrics", great boulders - some the size of small houses - that are presumably relics of the last ice age. We speculate on how the glaciers managed to roll these huge boulders to the top of the mountain. No idea.

At the summit we exit and make our way through eccentric-laden forest glades to a glorious church overlooking the city. It's truly beautiful.

So is the large square over which it looks. We try to capture something of its magic with the camera.

Above the church is a giant illustrated cross that lights up the building at night for miles around.

Then we begin a trek down on foot. The cable car operators said it would take 40 minutes. It takes closer to an hour. The cobbled track and steps soon give way to a steep, unkempt path, interspersed with steep steps. A party of Portuguese comes puffing up the hill. Jones had suggested doing the same but I'd vetoed the idea. It was hard enough getting down.

Eventually we reenter the outskirts of Guimaraes and walk back to the hotel for a shower and snooze. I am soaked with perspiration.

After a bite we set off for the city's archeological museum. The map of the city streets is
poor and we have a hard time finding it. Local people mis-direct us.

There are no other visitors there and the official at the door adopts us when he discovers that we speak Portuguese.

We get a detailed tour of the fabulous collection of stone carvings, dating back thousands of years before the Romans set foot in Iberia. The carvings feature multiple fertility symbols and many variations on the swastika that the Nazis were later to adopt.

There are Celtic crosses, Roman inscriptions and inscriptions in Portuguese dating back to the plagues that devastated much of Europe. We thank our enthusiastic official, tip him for his efforts and exit.

After a coffee break, we head for our final destination, yet another museum.

This one is featuring an exhibition of angels down the centuries. The sound of it doesn't appeal but we find the actual exhibits both beautiful and fascinating. However little sense it makes to paint and sculpt male figures dressed in armour with large wings attached to their backs in the name of the angels, artists did it for centuries.

At the other end of the scale, fat little baby cherubs cluster around the Virgin to lend their support - and presumably God's - to her special status. There are a dozen paintings of Virgin and Child - often a large ugly child squatting on her lap - and an equal number of life-size wood carvings of the same, to say nothing of the multiple renderings of the unpleasant death of St Sebastian, martyred by bowmen.

HERE PORTUGAL WAS BORN


Such art was intended for religious propaganda purposes and to illustrate divine approval of one or other ruler.

Today's leaders use TV ads instead; only the medium has changed.

Strange and unbelievable as we find it, it is also quite moving. And we walk back to the hotel with a sense of satisfaction.

20 May

From Guimaraes we head south again to Alcobaca (pronounced "alcobassa), a modest town located a couple of hours north of Lisbon. It's an easy drive and Milady, as I've come to call the GPS, with her cutglass English accent, leads us directly to our hotel, an olde worlde pile on the edge of the town. It's perfectly comfortable, however, and it overlooks the giant fomer Cisterian monastery that is Alcobaca's pride and glory.

After checking in, we make our way down the hill, across the square - where various folk dressed in traditional costume have set up stalls - to the monastery. This institution occupies a square, with each side some 200 metres long, at the heart of which is a large church.

It's a very large church.

A sign at the entrance says it's the largest church in Portugal and we believe it. Entrance to the church is free. It's huge and inspiringly beautiful. Inside various groups are being conducted around. The construction is of white stone. On either side of the transept are two elaborately carved sepulchres.

One is of King Pedro I of Portugal, the other of the woman he loved, Ines de Castro. She, unfortunately for the pair of them, came from a politically controversial family and was assassinated on the orders of the king's father before the former came to the throne. So it was only in death that their love for each other was acknowledged.

We pay a small fee to enter the adjoining monastery, making our way through a hall covered in blue picture tiles and adorned with the sculpted figures of Portuguese kings. The cloister is immense, the largest I've ever seen. The Portuguese translation, claustro, alerts me to the origins of the English word "claustrophobic". Around the large garden are a dozen rooms and halls where the monks lived out their lives, each with a small printed guide in English and Portuguese.

As a side-show, a choir competition is taking place in one of the halls. The singing sounds most attractive although the melody from the choir on stage is all but drowned out by the clamour from members of the next choir, lining up outside the hall.

Occasional showers rain down on us and on the folk dancers and stall-holders on the square outside. Even so, their spirits do not appear to be dampened. Groups of musicians play their music, dancers dance, skipping rope holders spin the rope for skippers to jump, basket makers, vegetable growers, tile decorators and others all do their best to market their wares.

Jonesy snaps away as a little girl chases pigeons and the party continues around us.

21 May

This wasn't our best day. Although I had carefully downloaded the directions to the Holiday Inn Express near Lisbon airport, and carefully keyed the address into the GPS, circumstances conspired against us.

Let me keep a long day short.

What we discovered after the event was that the hotel had improved its website directions since I had downloaded them several months earlier.

And that although the hotel is just a few kilometres from Lisbon airport, one has to put an adjacent municipality in the GPS as the city destination.

And that the directions given on the website do not work unless one is actually leaving the airport rather than passing it on the freeway.

In short, we spend a frustrating hour driving through Lisbon, able at times to see the hotel without being able to reach it. Eventually we managed to persuade a taxi driver to lead us there. Otherwise, we'd never have found it. What a bugger!

22 May

I woke to find that Jones had been ill for much of the night, seemingly as a result of food poisoning. Between her visits to the bathroom we packed - and then followed the hotel minibus to the airport where we parked the car. Jones was ill again as she got out. Our first visit in the airport was to the pharmacy. The medication we acquired gradually restored her although it was only towards the end of the day that she was able to take any food.