Saying goodbye to Lisbon
The church part of the monastery.
On our final day with everything done we wanted to accomplish, we decided to take the short train trip back to Belem. Although the lines were too long on this once again hot, humid day to get into the monastery and we decided we didn’t need to see another church, we were able to get into Pateis Belem and have the famous custard tarts. The monastery first started making them in 1837 and although there are copycats everywhere in Portugal, which we have tried, but we wanted to have the original secret recipe and they were very nice! Warm out of the oven is the best way.
The intricate details up close.
At the end of the square where we’ve been residing, is the nacional teatro or national theater as we would call it. During the day it looks imposing and at night beautiful. It has a rather checkered history though. It was built in the 1840’s but the site’s previous incarnation was used for public hangings, ritual burning of heretics and held bullfights there. I guess that is why the earthquake of 1775 demolished it!
Also note the pattern on the square. We see this once in awhile in the area and it has the weird feeling of being wavy although the stones are flat.
We were walking home from a restaurant and also captured the train station to Sintra, previously posted, all lit up.
Another interesting building is the main municipal building down by the seafront. Although most of the important buildings are grey stone, they are architecturally beautiful. There are fewer brightly colored tile buildings here in Lisbon in contract to Porto or south in the towns and cities of the Algarve.
We use Santander as our bank in Europe. They are global although based in Spain. They are probably the most popular bank in England. We were surprised to be walking down the street and see a huge Santander bank. Many people were stopping to take photos because it was so imposing.
Our bank
I’ll wrap up our journey in the next post…til then…
