Brian's Place

Some Places To Enjoy Life... In Portugal

Portugal is a relatively recent discovery for us, and it didn't take us long to fall in love with the country and with its very friendly people. The cost of living is low, and the Portuguese really care about their environment, with almost 100% of their energy needs coming from renewables.

The Portuguese have a special relationship with the English, stemming from the old alliance between our two countries (the oldest such alliance in the world that is still in force).

• Lisbon
• Sintra
• Porto and the Douro River

• If you follow the links in the right hand panel, you will hopefully find a lot of useful or interesting information. The first (reddish-brown) links will take you to maps of some of the places mentioned on this page.
• Links in that panel will generally open in a new window.

Lisbon

...is one of our favourite cities. It's a huge place, with far more to see and do than is shown here.

If you click any image below you will be taken to more information about the place shown, which in some cases will come from my Categorian blog.

If you're interested, photos of our 2017 trip to Lisbon (which includes a cruise on the Tagus river) will be found here.

• MAP
• Click here for a map of Lisbon and the Tagus River (opens in a new tab or window).

The Avenida da Liberdade (Lisbon's equivalent of the Champs Elysée in Paris, except for café and restaurant prices!)

Locals at one of the pavement snack bars, where a generous glass of wine cost less than €5 and an espresso €1.

In the background is an entirely peaceful protest about fees for adult education which took over an hour to pass!

Lisbon's Eden Theatre on the Avenida, a wonderful Art Deco theatre/cinema from the 30's, now converted into a hotel. I love the way in which the Portuguese often incorporate trees into their major buildings - another example further down this page.

We learnt a lot about Lisbon's fascinating history in the Lisboa Story Centre, a cultural museum well worth visiting. It includes a very realistic recreation on film of the Great Lisbon earthquake of 1755

Outside the Centre on the Praça do Comércio (Commerce Square). The very large Italian restaurant here (Nosolo Italia) specialises in pizza, and is an inexpensive and very pleasant place to eat (I shudder to think what the equivalent place in Venice, for example, would set you back!).

The Praça do Comércio (Commerce Square) was the setting-out point for explorations and commerce that affected so much of the world that we know today, as we learnt at the Lisboa Story Centre (see above), and from the Discoveries Monument (see below).

Near the mouth of the Tagus, very much a working river, where the river cruise boats turn around

Sailboats passing the Champalimaud Centre for the Unknown, said to be the world's most advanced centre for research into cancer, brain damage and blindness, both medically and from an architectural point of view. From the river it looks a little like a cruise ship, but it is designed to look quite different from almost any angle in which it is approached.

Through the huge oval-shaped windows you can see a forested area within the building (with its own water features) that is used as part of the healing regime - go here and here if you would like to see more of the Centre

The Lisbon Oceanarium (location in the centre of this map) is said to be one of the best in the world. It is located on the banks of the Tagus (which the locals pronounce somewhat like a sneeze), which is enormously wide at this point, being crossed nearby by the 12km long Vasco da Gama Bridge. Click the image for my blog post about it.

• More on Lisbon...
• A local's guide to Lisbon: 10 top tips

Sintra

Sintra (map link) is a very picturesque hill town, which can be reached by a 40-minute commuter train ride from Lisbon (costing less than 3€). It's a UNESCO World Heritage site with an interesting history, and has been among other things a place for aristocracy and royalty to escape to in hot weather.

We spent 6 days there in June 2017, staying at a wonderful Airbnb place. A small selection from my Categorian blog post about our visit appears below - click any image if you would like to see the whole thing.

I took this picture of Sintra's centre on a walk down from the Castle of the Moors - see later. The building with the conical white roofs is the National Palace of Sintra, which we greatly enjoyed visiting last year. Our Airbnb place (see next photos) is just outside the left edge of the shot.

...but there are places to visit even higher. From here we could see the palace in the vast Quinta da Regaleira, which looks down on the Castle of the Moors (click any image above if you would like to see more from my full blog post).