By taxi or downhill

If you are going to explore Lisbon, then take taxis uphill and walk down. It just makes sense.

We walked out of the hotel for 50 metres and Lyn decided that her skirt might lead to sunburn. She went back to change and I walked downhill to the information centre intending to buy a Lisbon card for transport and reduced entry fees. I learned that on Monday the national sites and monuments are closed on Mondays and I observed that the traffic was fairly horrible and I knew that Lyn would not go on the metro. It made sense then not to buy a Lisbon card today. I then walked back up the hill to meet Lyn. This latter experience led to my brainwave. Catch taxis!

A fellow traveller in Porto had strongly recommended the Gulbenkian museum so we grabbed a taxi and off we went. It turned out to be stunning. Gulbenkian was an Armenian-born oil magnate who amassed a huge fortune by creating companies like Royal Dutch Shell and keeping 5% of everything he created. A large part of his fortune was used to acquire thousands of incredible artworks or distributed in various philanthropic efforts. The Lisbon collections occupy a large complex set in a beautiful park which is open to the public. We spent hours there.

We walked out to see a taxi dropping someone off. We jumped in and headed off to the Castle of St George overlooking the city. As castles go it’s ok but as a lookout over Lisbon it is awesome.

The everyday items in the castle museum were rather ho hum after the wonders of the Gulbenkian but we clambered about and admired the resident peacocks which had the run of the place.

From the castle the walk was downhill to the cathedral. This was rather lumpish but at least cool. Lyn got to light candles. They have found remains in excavations in the cloisters including, of course, a Roman road. I’d hazard a guess therefore that there was originally a Roman temple here. Historically, people tend to be fairly unoriginal about where they build stuff.

Further downhill we stopped at a mirador (lookout) directly above the cruise ship port. 

Eventually, at the bottom of the hill, we came to the vast Praça do Comércio (which sounds infinitely more exotic than Commerce Square). I suppose that when you consider the things that have happened here, it is exotic. Phoenician traders, Roman garum manufacturers, Visigoths, Moors, Berbers, crusaders, Vasco Da Gama’s caravels, coffee from Brazil, Magellan, spices from Goa, the 1755 earthquake and tsunami and the Carnation Revolution all make it a pretty exotic sort of place. We learned about all of this in the very clever Lisbon Stories museum. One room was set up like a warehouse of Portugal’s golden age and the delightful thing was, you smelled the spices as you walked through it. Outside in the square there is a sculpture of a king on a horse and a really big arch thing.

Sadly, this final stop had taken us to the bottom of the hill, which meant breaking the Lisbon walking rule for the last 400 metres. We staggered uphill to the wonderful bookshop we discovered yesterday. There, we ate cake and drank beer and tea. (Yes, it is a really good bookshop.)

While drinking my beer, I was flicking through a translation of Pessoa’s poetry which Lyn had found, and meditating on Portugal’s history. I came to this.