Off to Lisbon

I met my friends Vickie, Babsy and Ruth, along with a soon-to-be new friend Susan, in Lisbon, where we’ll enjoy a food and wine adventure all over Portugal. It was misty, foggy and chilly upon our arrival, but that will change soon.

It turns out I remember nothing from my brief visit twenty years ago, so it was like seeing the city for the first time. Rossio Square is ringed with jacaranda trees in full lavender-hued bloom.

Vickie and I arrived a day early and stayed at a cute hotel just on the square and facing a pedestrian street with many shops and restaurants. The stone work on the streets is intriguing.

On Sunday we decamped to the Avenida Palace, our official hotel for this food and wine vacation (http://foodnwinevacations.com) and met up with the rest of our tribe, the three other folks on the tour, Luis, our guide for the week, and Sam, the owner of the company, who’ll be with us for a couple of days.

The weather and some marching demonstrators interfered with our meetup with the driver who would take us to Belém, but we eventually got there. Belém is Portuguese for Bethlehem, and is the port city from which all the great Portuguese explorers set off on their voyages of discovery. Riches from these explorations funded the gargantuan monuments here, including the Mosteiro des Jerónimos, now a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Our delay getting out of town meant we didn’t arrive there before closing, but seeing it from the outside was impressive nonetheless.

Elsewhere, the Maritime Museum, the Belém Tower and the Monument of the Discoveries celebrate Henry the Navigator, Vasco da Gama and others who sailed to all corners of the world.

In front of the colossal Monument to the Discoveries (a modern structure dating to the 1960s) is a map of the world fashioned in marble, which highlights all the places the Portuguese explorers discovered, from Brazil to India to China and parts of coastal Africa.

This bakery, above, is renowned as the best producer of the delicious custard pastries called pasteis. Warm from the oven and sprinkled with cinnamon, they’re a decadent treat, and we enjoyed ours.

Our day ended with dinner in a traditional seafood restaurant.

First thing Monday morning our skilled driver, Adelha, got us out of town for a drive through the picturesque countryside toward Evora, once the capital of Portugal. Rolling hills, vineyards, olive groves and grazing cattle made for peaceful scenery as we motored east through the Alentejo. After being greeted by several screeching peacocks, we strolled leisurely through the town within its ancient city walls, visiting the Church of San Francisco and its bizarre Chapel of the Bones, crafted from the skeletons of some 5000 people unearthed in the area.

An adjacent museum included an enormous array of crèches donated by a wealthy collector, along with a highly detailed crèche depicting Belém as Bethlehem.