Yesterday's goal was Belem, where some of Lisbon's strongest tourist drawcards hang out.

You can go on the bus or the tram, but we walked back to Cais do Sodre, the departure station for our Cascais trip, took the train as far as Alges, and -- over the course of the day -- walked home.

With a detour for lunch, plus a lap of various sights, this ended up being a whacking 16-kilometre stretch, so I'm not sure I'd totally recommend it as an itinerary. Especially if you still have to shop for your Valentine's Day tea on the way home.

Nevertheless, it was an interesting day.

The first theme that emerges is colonialism. The Padro dos Descobrimentos commemorates Portugal's 15th-century explorers (with no obvious reference to the havoc they wreaked around the world).




The Tower of Belem incorporates a carving of a rhinoceros, encapsulating in one tragic story the way the West dealt with the exotic "other".


And the Monastery of Jeronimos is the product of the 5% tax levied on the spices imported into Portugal: "Originally designed as a modest monastery complex, the excessive trade wealth extended the construction by 50 years, to create one of the most ornate religious buildings of Portugal. The site has a close connection to the early explorers, as Vasco da Gama spent his last night here before his epic voyage to India. Later the church was the location that sailors wives would come to pray for the safe return of their loved ones."




Silvia Rodriguez Maeso identifies a "postcolonial loop" at work in the urban tourism of Portugal, which "uninterruptedly repeats the narrative and interpretive structures of the 'Age of Discovery' -- ie, adventure, globalization, the positive and negative sides of 'expansion', the meeting of cultures..."

I really don't know how you pay tribute to the courage of the exploratory spirit while also recognizing that it unleashed untold evil on the world, which we are far from laying to rest even today.

Two practical points for this first half of the day:

Whereas you need a ticket to enter the Monastery of Jeronimos (and the queues, even for the ticketed, are substantial), you can enter the very impressive church free of charge (and we can testify that the lunch-time period is pretty quiet). Funding and origins notwithstanding, it's really lovely.











Belem is an expensive area. So head off perpendicularly up the hill for lunch. The Padaria da Esquina does a nice menu do dia (yesterday, for EUR 8.90, they were offering an all-in of pea-and-ham soup with bread, quiche with salad, juice or water, and coffee). (Generally, we find that padarias, or bakeries, offer not only baked goods but also full-scale meals at reasonable prices.)

The second theme-of-the-day was technology.

The Ponte 25 de Abril, inaugurated in 1966, but renamed to commemorate the peaceful revolution of 1974, spans the Tagus in a most impressive fashion:




And a must-see, even for one as technologically challenged as PT, is the Central Tejo, a former themal power station that has been scrubbed up and turned into a museum.

Don't ask me to reproduce all the details of the workings. But I found it interesting from both an aesthetic and a social history point of view.



















On the way home we popped in at Taylor's to acquire a dry white port (a type that we had not had the opportunity to taste in Porto). Highly recommendable, especially when paired with a trio of Portuguese cheeses and some presunto...

Today's destination was a much less famous area, but still a very charming one: Graca.

This neighbourhood is not bang in the middle of the tourist trail. True, it's probably heading in that direction, but at the moment, it's just a lovely place to hang out while admiring views, tiled houses, and street art: