JULY 2002
Our sail from the Azores to Portugal was wonderful. It took us exactly 5 day to make the trip to Lisbon, Portugal. The weather was cold but the winds were perfect. We motored for one hour to get out of the marina and then one-hour to get into the marina on the mainland, the rest was great sailing! We made wonderful time. We were getting to be regular “old salts”. We settled into the ocean lifestyle with ease. Sharon sighted Portugal first. It was a thrill to complete a major ocean passage. It was hard to believe we were in Europe. A whole different continent!
We made landfall in the town of Cascais just a few miles from Lisbon. We spent a week in the area of Lisbon or Lisboa as the locals call it. Lisboa is a beautiful old city. We couldn’t believe after crossing the Atlantic that a Golden Gate Bridge (look-a-like) greeted us as we approached the city! On closer inspection Lisboa’s bridge wasn’t quite the same as San Francisco’s but it sure made us feel right at home. We spent days just wandering the streets checking out all the sights and finding all the best “dulce” pastry shops. Portugal does have good sweets… We took a sightseeing bus tour of the whole town, which gave us a great overview of the sights and the history.
The city has a long and varied history. During the 1400-1500's it was THE major trading port for all of Europe. Portuguese sailors were the first to really set out and explore the world. They established all the major spice trade routes around Africa to India and the Far East. We visited a huge Marine History Museum in Lisboa. The museum showed all the routes and early maps and charts developed by the Portuguese explorers. We also toured some beautiful old churches. One of the churches had an archeological dig in it's court yard that showed streets and buildings dating back 2000 years...even before the Rome times.
Lisboa is definitely an old...old city. Of course no old city would be complete without several Castles. We toured a couple of the castles, huge things!
Europe definitely has a very different look and feel about it than anywhere we have traveled. We think we are really going to enjoy our time here!
Cascais, the town we were anchored in was very cute. It was the weekend beach resort area for all the people of Lisboa. We enjoyed sampling the restaurants and listening to several local musical bands. We took a day bus trip in the mountains to the town of Sintra. Sintra had four huge beautiful old castles. We toured the castle of Palacio da Pena. It was a gorgeous place with a lot of Arabian influences.
Castle Penna in Sintra Our friends Rod and Dee flew home on July 15th. They had been with us helping out for two months. They were a wonderful guess and big assets during the long ocean watches. They made the whole journey so much easier. We toasted one last glass of wine; reminisced about all the fun we had and with hugs said our good-byes.
We left the Lisbon area a spent a week hopping along the coast to the southern most point of Portugal. Its called Sao Vincent and it has the most beautiful lighthouse we have ever seen perch on top some very high cliffs. The lighthouse is the largest in Europe with 2 tons of brass and 2 tons of crystal. It puts a light out to sea for 50 miles! We anchored just inside the point in a great little bay. We had the bay all to ourselves for two nights. The cliffs surrounding the bay were 300 ft high and vertical. They were full of caves. We enjoyed exploring the caves in the dinghy. We went ashore and also explored cliff by hiking along the top. The Portuguese fishermen are true fishermen but crazy...they fish off the tops of these cliffs! Talk about a long, long way to haul up your catch!
Then we had a great sail 30 miles eastward along Portugal's Algarve coast towards the "Rock of Gibraltar". We thought we must have missed Europe and landed in Miami!!! High rise hotels and condos everywhere. There was lots of water traffic; people playing on booze cruises, jet ski's and paddle boats, etc,etc,etc..... The beaches are white, very, very long and packed with pretty colorful umbrellas. Each beach seems to have about 10,000 sunlovers. We knew this was the playground of the Portuguese and Europeans but WOW........ We never knew there could be so many miles of “sun worshippers”!
We spent the last week of July in the middle of the Portugal Algarve coast. A nice little harbor anchorage called Portimoa. The weather had finally become really nice with temps in the daytime were in the high 80's and nights delightfully cool. Portimoa is a cute little old fishing village surrounded by new high-rise apartments, timeshares and hotels! The cliffs all around Portimoa and the near by town of Lagos were very colorful. The rock varied in tones of bright orange, red and yellow, quite pretty. The cliff were full of grottos and cave. We had fun exploring them by dinghy. We spent a couple days doing some varnishing. Reality got a little abused in the 3500 mile Atlantic crossing....water over the decks for days on end is a little bit tough on any finish work!
We rented a car and spent a couple days touring inland Portugal. We drove up to the center of the country to the beautiful old walled city of Evora. The countryside throughout southern Portugal reminded us of the Sierra gold country foothills. The hills are covered with golden grass and oak trees, only these oaks are all "cork oaks". It's was very interesting. Every single oak tree is marked and harvested for its cork bark. The best wine corks of the world come from Portugal! We stopped and talked (with lots of sign language) to a cork "farmer". He said the cycle between harvesting the cork oak bark is 10 years. The bark of every tree is taken in sections as the tree matures and is thick enough to be harvested. The lower trunk is taken first. Years later the middle section is taken and then the major upper branches. Then they repeat the cycle by sections. All the trees we saw were in various thickness of bark. When the bark is freshly harvested that section of the tree is bright red/orange. Then as it ages it becomes gray. There were lots of huge storage piles of freshly harvested cork. The trees seem to be very well taken care of as the under brush is kept cleared so if a fire were to get started it would blow through the grasses quickly and not harm the trees. It was lots of fun to see.
After several hours of driving through the cork oak hills the terrain leveled out to huge grass lands and farms. We passed mile upon mile of Sunflower fields and Olive orchards. We saw an area that was covered with storks’ nest. Storks build huge stick nest on the tops of trees or sometimes on a bit less natural power poles. Most of the nests are all along the rivers. The open countryside then stretched for miles dotted occasionally with a tiny village. The villages were all densely populated, tight, with tiny little streets packed with shops and homes. All the buildings were bright white stucco with red tile roofs. Each village had a quaint town square and lovely church. The dense cute villages transition abruptly back to open countryside. It is kind of nice, suburbs do not exist in Portugal.
Our destination, the town of Evora was a delightful old walled city with lots of beautiful churches and castles. The city had ruins from the 1st century Roman times. The Castles were from 12th century Moorish period. The churches varied from Roman-Gothic, Baroque, Gothic-Manueline, Corinthian, Renaissance dating all throughout the 15th and 17th century. The names and styles all begin to blur! They are all really amazing to see! One of the churches had a chapel of bones! The walls and columns of the room were all built out of human bones and skulls.... about two thousands of them! Wild!
As you can tell were are still wide eyed about all this old stuff!