The November Epic # 4: Major City, Hit and Run

Yes, all cruise tours tend to be hit-and-run. I knew this one would be. The surprise was to feel after the tour that I had actually gotten a fairly thorough look at a city which was entirely new to me. For sure, it was a good enough look to make me eager to come back as soon as possible!

So let me welcome you to a city where enormous public squares rub shoulders with narrow little alleyway-sized shopping streets…,

 …where houses are painted in brilliant colours or decorated with thousands upon thousands of cheerful ceramic tiles…,

…where the car is not king and public transit can take the form of little 24-seat wooden trams built as long ago as 1903.

 

Welcome to Lisboa, known in English as Lisbon.

Right off the bat, I want to pass on a language lesson for those who are not familiar with Portuguese, either the continental European or the Brazilian varieties.

Lisboa is pronounced “Leezh-bo-a,” with the “zh” representing the soft “j” sound of French “jeudi.”

Want to say, “good day?” That’s “bom dia,” with the “m” sounding almost like an “n.” That’s in Europe. In Brazil, as one of the ship’s officers had already explained to us, it comes out as “bom gee-ah.”

All in all, our tour guide summed it up this way: if you’re familiar with Spanish, you will be able to read and understand a fair number of Portuguese words and phrases (although not, all by any means). Being able to follow spoken Portuguese, with all its unusual twists of pronunciation, including the softening of many consonant sounds – well, that’s another custard tart altogether.

In any case, Lisboa is one of the older cites of Europe, with a heritage as a major commercial port stretching back to the Phoenicians, who were believed to have arrived here as early as 2900 years ago. Today, it’s a large, bustling port and business centre still, one of the major metropolitan cities of the world.

But that’s today. Much of the city was a heap of smoking ruins 263 years ago, after the main dividing point in the city’s history: the great Lisboa earthquake of 1755. Believed to have been the strongest earthquake in recorded history, with an estimated rating of 9 on the Richter scale, it reduced most of Lisboa to heaps of rubble, set off innumerable fires, and spawned a tsunami which flooded into the city at an estimated height of 10 metres (30-plus feet). So, much of what you see in Lisboa today has been built or extensively rebuilt and restored since 1755.

My tour here had two different parts. The first part was a trip through the streets of Lisboa on one of those antique wooden trams. We were following the route of the public transit line # 28, which snakes up and down through the hilly streets in the Alfama district, behind the cruise port area. More accurately, # 28 was following us since there was one of the yellow, 1935-vintage city trams leaving the terminus loop right behind our two red tour vehicles.

During the tram tour, we were served a quintessential Lisboa treat: a glass of port wine and a rich, sweet custard tart. One small glass of wine and one bite of a tart was all the sugar I could stand for one day. It helps to explain why I dozed off later on during the bus ride back to the ship!

Our departure point was right outside the Basilica da Estrela, which was built in fulfillment of a religious vow made by Princess Maria, who financed the beginning of the work after she succeeded King Joseph I on the throne as Queen Maria I.

The most hair-raising hills and curves were handled with seeming nonchalance by our tram driver and the tram itself. These centenarians move slowly, but that’s mainly so that they don’t hop the tracks on any of the curves or hills – some samples of which are shown here.

 Yes, the hills really do get this steep!

The biggest bottleneck on the whole route is the spot where some 200 metres of road are shared by traffic in opposite directions, controlled by traffic signals so that only one direction can go through at a time. Here, the eastbound and westbound tram tracks are interlaced.

All along the way, we saw life in Lisboa in all its variety: shoppers and snackers and morning caffeiners, students and adults and the elderly, drivers and walkers and cyclists, highbrow stores, lowbrow cafes, and everything in between. We passed large, dignified buildings like the Cathedral, looking almost as much a medieval fortress as a church….

 ... a theatre looking like a department store, and a railway station doing the same.

 

 

Everywhere we went, we passed numerous apartments of varying sizes. As in all of the world’s major cities, single-family homes in the central districts are virtually non-existent. All along the route, we kept getting into the most ridiculously narrow streets that anyone ever thought of running a tram line through. The reason is simple – these are some of the wider streets in the Alfama district which this tram line serves.

If you're wondering where the other track is here, it's in an adjacent street. If you're thinking that the trams look tiny, you're not wrong -- and it's not just their seating capacity either. The tracks are built to a narrow gauge to make the work of climbing and turning sharp corners easier.

At the east end of the tram ride, at Praça Martim Moniz, we transferred back to a coach to visit a few major sights lying far to the west of the downtown area.

The first of these is called the Torre de Belém. This fortress sits right at the point where the broad estuary of the Tagus narrows down to a channel which can be controlled by gunfire. 

You just knew this guy was going to stick his nose in again, didn’t you?

A few hundred metres east of the tower is a historic lighthouse, and east of that again is a commanding monument on the riverbank which you couldn’t possibly miss except in a dense fog: the Monument of the Discoveries.

The monument depicts Prince Henry the Navigator, leading the march and holding a caravel, a typical merchant ship of the time, in his hand. Prince Henry was forbidden by law to go exploring himself as a member of the royal family, but as a second-best he could spearhead the efforts to build better ships and finance better prepared explorations. He did, and here he stands, with the various famous explorers lined up behind him on the left side, and on the right side the shipbuilders, sailmakers, craft people, and cartographers whose contributions did so much to advance western European knowledge of the world again from the darkness and oblivion into which it had descended with the fall of Rome.

 

And before anyone gets ready to toss me into the garbage bin, I can assure you that I am fully cognizant of the downstream effects of these exploratory voyages, both evil and good. 

Directly behind the Monument, and across the railway tracks and highway, lies the Mosteiro dos Jeronimós (Jeronimós Monastery), the burial site of Vasco da Gama, one of the leading explorers. This group of sites requires a lengthy side trip from the city centre area, either by car or by public transit.

The views are dominated by the imposing suspension bridge across the Tagus, completed in 1966. Originally named after the dictator Salazar, the name was changed after he died and the dictatorial regime under his successor was overthrown, and it’s now called the 25^th of April Bridge in honour of the date of the Carnation Revolution which ended the dictatorship.

Our final stop was at the upper end of King Edward VII Park, named in honour of the British King who was a great friend of Portugal during his reign from 1901-1913. By this time, the distance was growing hazy but the view does extend on a clear day across the centre of the city and the Tagus to the far shore.

One of the things Lisboa has in common with many other European cities is the fiendish limestone cobbles on streets and sidewalks, which become slippery as ice when wet. In this city, only two colours are used: light grey and black. A number of places have them laid in a swirling pattern of waves which are appropriate for a maritime city, but which are said to give some people motion sickness.

 

And here’s a spot where the tree roots are really doing a number on what was originally a smooth and level sidewalk. This one nearly gave me motion sickness as I walked across it.

At the end of our visit, we departed in daylight for our next leg, and that gave me a chance to get a whole series of views across the entire city, from the Alfama district right behind our cruise terminal…

… to the hilltop St. George fortress…,

… to the Commerce Plaza on the riverbank, …           

… to the Basilica de Estrela, its dome and towers plainly visible across the lower buildings, …

… to our passage under the bridge, …

 … and finally, the monastery, monument, and Belem Tower on the north bank just before the river mouth widened out to more open water.

I have barely scratched the surface with Lisboa. I will be back!

Here's the updated map of our itinerary.

Source Base Map:  https://freevectormaps.com/world-maps/europe/WRLD-EU-01-0002?ref=atr

  

NOTE:  This post has been delayed due to technical issues with the ship's internet. Ever since the voyage began, we've been running on a slow signal when in port, and the signal has all but vanished when we are at sea. Our visit to Lisboa was on November 14. It was only this morning, somewhere west of the Azores, that we suddenly found ourselves with a properly-working internet, and I was finally able to update with this post.  With any luck, it will not take as many days again for me to complete my post about the visit to Ponta Delgada in the Azores.