Category: Spain, Portugal and Morocco, November 2017

Once we managed to get past the uncongenial guardian of the Triton Gate, Pena Palace revealed a myriad of new wonders. We were able to get close-up to the towers, turrets and terraces we had glimpsed from the park, and to view from above some of the marvels we had seen on the way up.

Pena Palace has a lot of towers, the tallest and most imposing of which is the Clock Tower, dating from 1843. It rises above the Queen’s Terrace, which can be reached by a steep climb up a flight of stairs, and provides some of the best views of the surrounding area. Among the other towers, my favorite was one which I don’t know the name of, but which I call “Rapunzel’s Tower” because it reminded me of the Brothers Grimm fairy tale about the girl who is imprisoned by a witch in a tall tower and rescued by a handsome prince for whom she lets down her long hair so he can climb up to her window. The girl atop this tower didn’t have long hair, and the prince had to climb the stairs to rescue her, and she was a brunette whereas Rapunzel was a blonde, but I had fun with it anyway.

And here are some of the expansive views of the Lisbon area and the palace park that I captured with my 70-200mm telephoto lens from the ramparts of the castle.

The Queen’s Terrace also provided an excellent vantage point for viewing and photographing parts of the New Palace. One of its features is a large turret tower where Ferdinand II planned to construct bedrooms for himself and Queen Maria. However, the New Palace was not completed before Maria died in 1853 after giving birth to her eleventh child, a stillborn son, and Ferdinand remained in his old quarters in the former cloister.

A modern addition to the New Palace is a cafe occupying a section of the roof, with a superb view of the park and the countryside.

The cloister was the heart of the old monastery and is relatively small compared to, for example, that of the Jeronimos Monastery in Belem, since it was intended for occupation by only 18 monks. The monks’ cells became the quarters of the royal family after the conversion of the monastery into a palace.

The galleries of the two-story cloister open up onto a central square patio through arches on both floors. The patio has an oyster shell like the one where the Triton is seated outside, but the Triton is missing here. The walls of the cloister are finished in gorgeous Hispano-Mudéjar tiles with geometric designs. Yes, I’m a sucker for ceramic tiles but these are incredible.

Ferdinand II was no longer King after the death of Queen Maria, but he was regent to his young son, the 16-year-old King Pedro V, until 1855. Pedro himself died of typhoid fever in 1861 and was succeeded by his brother Luis, who then ruled as Luis I until 1889. As King-Father, Ferdinand continued to carry some clout, and he occupied Pena Palace until his own death. In his later years, in defiance of the conventions of the Victorian era, he shared his chambers with his mistress, the Swiss-American actress Elisa Hensler, whom he eventually married (1869). To make the union seem more respectable, Ferdinand’s cousin, the Duke of Saxe-Coburg, bestowed upon Elisa the title of Countess of Edla. When Ferdinand died in 1885, he left Pena Palace and its grounds to her. She sold it to King Luis, and the royal family made extensive use of it, especially after Luis’ son Carlos became King on his father’s death in 1889.

Whereas Ferdinand II had occupied the upper floor of the cloister, Carlos I moved into the relatively modest quarters on the ground floor and left his wife Amelia, a French princess, to occupy the more regal apartments above. But he made one significant innovation: in accordance with the improving standards of hygiene in the late 19th century, he turned one of the rooms adjoining his bedroom into a bathroom. He also decorated his office with racy paintings of nymphs and fauns. There is a painting of an ethereally beautiful nude woman in the royal quarters, but I was unable to obtain any information on its provenance, who painted it and for whom, or whom it was supposed to represent; I doubt whether it was a painting of the Countess of Edla.

Queen Amelia’s quarters included, in addition to the bedroom, an office and a tea room, where she would sip her tea in the morning and receive her personal visitors. The furniture in these rooms, some of it remaining from the days of the Countess of Edla, is quite opulent.

What had been the monks’ refectory was converted into the royal dining room. It retains the elegant 16th century Manueline-style vaulted ceiling with ribbing, but the tiles on the walls and the elegant oak furniture are 19th-century in origin. The table was set for twelve and a sumptuous meal was in prospect; unfortunately we couldn’t stay for dinner since we had other plans.

The kitchen, surprisingly, is huge, the largest room in the palace except for the Noble Hall. It was evidently intended to provide sumptuous meals not only for the royal dining room but also for formal banquets in the reception rooms. All the pots and pans are imprinted with the monogram of Ferdinand II, a tactic for deterring theft.

The Palace Chapel, next to the Dining Room, had been the Monastery Church of Our Lady of Pena prior to 1834, and Ferdinand II wisely left it mostly unchanged. It has the same type of ribbed vaulted ceiling as the Dining Room. It dates from the reign of King João (John) III (successor of Manuel I), who in 1528 commissioned Nicolas de Chanterenne, or Chantereine, a French sculptor and architect, to create the main altar retable. A retable (I had to look this up, since I’m not familiar with the terminology of ecclesiastical architecture) is a structure placed on or immediately behind and above the altar or communion table of a church – another word for it is “altarpiece.” Retables can be simple or complex. The one in the Pena Palace Chapel is an elaborate, exquisitely carved work in alabaster and limestone quarried from Sintra. By 1528 Chanterenne had already done extensive and masterful work in Spain and Portugal, including some of the finest sculpture of the Jerónimos Monastery in Belém; in 1519 King Manuel I had appointed him as his personal sculptor, and King João III continued to heap honors upon him. De Chanterenne worked on the monastery altarpiece from 1829 to 1832, and it is widely considered his greatest masterpiece. After completing it, he migrated with the King’s court to Évora, where he continued to live and work until his death in 1551.

As far as I can tell, the only significant change made Ferdinand II made to the chapel was to add a new stained glass window in 1841. Commissioned from a German firm, Kellner of Nuremberg, it depicts Vasco da Gama kneeling before King Manuel I after returning from the Indies. Manuel is said to have spotted da Gama’s ship sailing back into Lisbon Harbor from the monastery mountaintop in Sintra.

In the New Palace, Ferdinand II planned to inaugurate a great reception hall for ambassadors and other dignitaries, but the end of his kingship in 1853 put paid to that idea, and the chamber was set up as a billiard room instead. However, it is now known as the Noble Hall, or Great Hall, and has an appearance more in keeping with its original purpose. An elaborate 72-candle neo-rococo chandelier hangs from the ceiling, sumptuous sofas and tables line the walls, vases and china from Ferdinand’s porcelain collection are found throughout, and light enters the room through his more of his prized German stained-glass windows. The overall design is meant to be Arabesque, and four statues of Turkish janissaries stand in the room, one in each corner.

Adjacent to the Noble Hall in the New Palace is the Stag Room. This, of course, is where Ferdinand intended to screen his stag films. Again, though, things did not turn out as planned. For one thing, film had not been invented yet. So, being a devotee of King Arthur romances, he planned to have a Round Table placed around a central pillar, with suits of medieval knightly armor against the walls; swords and spears, crossbows, stuffed heads of stags and boars would be hung on the walls, in which his favorite heraldic stained glass windows would be installed; and sumptuous banquets for the King and his associates, supplied from the palace’s great kitchen, would be held there. But even this didn’t work out. According to some sources, the Round Table was duly provided, but when we were there, we saw only the central pillar and a few stag heads, but no table, round or otherwise. (You can see what it was supposed to look like here.)

Looking back, I can hardly believe we managed to see and do so much in one day – to see Lisbon’s King Edward VII Park, Belem, Jeronimos Monastery and Rossio Square in the morning, then Sintra and Pena Palace in the afternoon. Surely it must have taken two days to see all these sights! But no, the date-time stamps on the photos don’t lie; we did them all on November 5, 2017.

Sintra was an optional excursion on our Go-Ahead tour, but it was not optional for us; we had to see it. The previous year, on a visit to Bend, Chuck and Elouise Mattox had taken us to the Cafe Sintra in Bend, and introduced us to the owners, who were in fact from Sintra; and having learned something about the place, there was no way Sandie and I could not take advantage of an opportunity to go there.

Because Sintra is one of the most magical places on Earth. It is located in the mountains up above Lisbon, and commands marvelous views of the countryside all round. The town of Sintra is itself quite charming, but the major draw for tourists like us – 3.2 million of whom visited the area in 2017 – is the area’s castles and palaces. The major ones are the medieval Castle of the Moors (Castelo dos Mouros), the Portuguese Renaissance Sintra National Palace, and Pena National Palace. We visited only the last of these. I wish we could have seen the others, and I want to go back again and do so; but we would have needed more than one afternoon, or one day, to do that; I am grateful for having been allotted one afternoon of my life to see Pena.

Pena Palace (Palácio da Pena) is a bit reminiscent of Sleeping Beauty’s Castle in Disneyland, but that is only a pale shadow of Pena. The closest analogue I can think of is Neuschwanstein, the fairy-tale residence of the mad king Ludwig II of Bavaria. I’ve never been to Neuschwanstein (it’s on my bucket list), but Pena predates Neuschwanstein by several decades.

In 1836 the reigning Queen of Portugal, Maria II, married a German prince, Ferdinand of Saxe-Coburg. According to Portuguese law, a reigning queen’s consort could only become King after the birth of an heir, which occurred in 1837. In 1838 Ferdinand, now King Ferdinand II, acquired an old monastery, originally built by Manuel I in 1511, on the hill above the town of Sintra. It had belonged to the Hieronymites, the same order that Manuel had selected to manage the monastery in Belem, but it had been deserted since 1834, when the government had dissolved the religious orders in Portugal. Ferdinand was enchanted with the place and set about refurbishing it as a summer residence for the royal family, but soon he turned it into a project for a whole new palace, conceived in the spirit of 19th-century Romanticism. He hired a German architect, Wilhelm Ludwig von Eschwege, an aficionado of Rhine castles, to do the design, but himself took an active part in the work, introducing medieval, Islamic and Renaissance features and borrowing heavily from Manueline motifs.

The designers preserved as much of the original monastery as possible, including the cloisters, the dining room, the sacristy, and the chapel. To this they added the Queen’s Terrace on the southern end of the east wing, and a new clock tower. But then they added another entire wing, called the New Palace, yellow in color, contrasting with the Old Palace, which is mostly red. They also created a vast park surrounding the palace. You cannot go directly to the palace entrance; you have to debark from your bus at the entrance to the park and walk or take a shuttle tram the rest of the way to the palace itself. We took the tram.

Even the tram does not take you all the way to the palace, but stops in a glade a little way off, providing the unexpected advantage of being able to obtain great views of the palace while walking the short distance to the gates.

The first gateway opening into the palace complex is called the Door of Alhambra, or Alhambra Gate, so called because its design is said to have been inspired by the Gate of Justice in the Alhambra in Granada, Spain. Like the Gate of Justice, it features a double horseshoe-shaped Arabesque arch, Moorish tiles and Islamic symbols, in addition to elegant ceramic tiles. On the keystone of the arch is a carving of a human hand, the symbolism of which I’m still trying to ascertain. I particularly enjoyed the gargoyles in the shape of crocodiles which protrude from the corners of the arch. I call them “crocagoyles.” On top of the gate is a terrace with a walkway; tourists stroll casually along the terrace, oblivious to the threatening crocagoyles below.

After passing through the Alhambra Gate, we found ourselves in the Coach House Terrace, where visitors to the Palace would have alighted from their horse-drawn coaches in days of yore. There we made a 180 degree turn and proceeded up a ramp to the Monumental Gate, which was apparently designed to emulate a Renaissance castle gatehouse. It has been disparaged as “a somewhat ridiculous looking fortified portal” executed in a “mishmash of styles,” but I thought it perfectly suited the fantasy-castle setting. Diamond spikes front the archway, and two cylindrical turrets called “bartizans,” ostensibly designed to function as sentry boxes, are perched on the top corners, with five coats of arms between them. Going under the rounded archway, we crossed a fake drawbridge leading into the entrance tunnel and the residential wings of the Palace.

At this point we emerged onto a terrace fronting the central section of the palace, which consists of the restored monastery with its neo-Manueline facade.

Here we encountered what I consider the single most striking feature of Pena Palace, an absolutely bizarre, idiosyncratic, and delightful creation, the Triton Arch or Triton Gate. Looking at the many pictures Sandie and I shot of it from various angles, I cannot cease to be amazed that anyone could conceive such an outlandish chef-d’oeuvre.

In Greek mythology, the Triton was a minor sea god, a son of Poseidon and Amphitrite, usually depicted as having the upper parts of a man with a fish’s tail, and holding a trumpet made from a conch shell. The Triton at Pena Palace does not hold a trumpet. He is seated on an oyster shell on the wall beneath a bay window. A tree or vine appears to be growing out of his head, with a profusion of branches and leaves extending up to enfold the window above. Instead of a trumpet he holds two branches of the tree on either side. He does not look happy, but then I wouldn’t be happy either, if I had to sit on an oyster shell holding up a tree growing out of my head FOREVER. He looks down upon the terrace with a snarling, menacing, utterly hostile gaze, as if warning visitors away. But he did not deter us from entering the palace under the arch below.

In the course of researching the myriad features of Pena Palace, I’ve come across a few disparaging descriptions. One critic in particular characterized it as “a heavy handed mish mash of different architectural styles….looks like several castles smooshed together…a schizophrenic whirlwind of onion domes, turrets, crenellation, and fanciful sneering gargoyles.” Regarding the interior, the same reviewer, among others, advised skipping it: “Don’t let anyone tell you it’s a “must do.” It’s not….Like the outside, none of it really matches or is in a cohesive style. It’s rather amazing that someone wanted it all under the same roof.”

There’s some truth in this; the palace is indeed a manic hodge-podge of disparate and sometimes incompatible styles; but to me that’s part of its charm. I don’t demand coherence when it comes to architecture. Palaces built over the centuries, like the Alhambra in Spain (as we’ll see when we get there), often acquire various and sometimes clashing constructions. King Ferdinand II, who had Pena built over the course of a decade or two, could have striven for unity and coherence, but the result would have been less remarkable and exciting, and most likely pedestrian and boring. There are plenty of other nineteenth-century European palaces where one can find consistency, conformity and adherence to sometimes sterile conventions of design. I like Pena Palace as it is – a wild romp of the imagination, a free exercise of creative energy. It’s a nineteenth-century precursor of Disneyland, where someone’s wildest dreams became reality, and in my view it beats its descendant hands-down.

And we didn’t skip the interior, which we found just as fascinating as the exterior. In the next post, I’ll deal with that.

On the night of 7 July 1497, Vasco da Gama and his crew gathered in a dilapidated church in Belém to pray, before departing on the voyage that would take them to India and launch a global commercial and colonial empire. The church was then maintained by the monks of the military-religious Order of Christ (formerly the Templars), who provided aid and comfort to mariners passing through Lisbon harbor.

But the Portuguese king, Manuel I (r. 1495-1521), had already determined to replace the decrepit old church with a monastery which would become the final resting place for himself and his successors of the Portuguese royal dynasty, the House of Avis. In subsequent years, flush with cash obtained from taxes on the spices brought back by da Gama and his successors, Manuel began construction of the new monastery in a new, sumptuous and ornate fashion which became the national style of Portugal, known ever after as the Manueline. But he selected a different religious society, the Order of St. Jerome, to manage the monastery; thus it became the Mosteiro dos Jerónimos, or Jerónimos Monastery, the Monastery of the Hieronymites. However, the new monastery church continued to be known as the Igreja (Church) Santa Maria de Belém.

The monastery was not completed at the time of Manuel’s death in 1521. Construction was resumed in 1550, but stopped again after Philip II of Spain seized the Portuguese throne in 1580 – he was spending all available funds on his new monastery-palace near Madrid, the Escorial. Yet some work was done even before the restoration of Portuguese independence in 1640, when the monastery regained its pre-eminence, becoming the necropolis for the new Portuguese dynasty, the House of Braganza.

The National Museum of Archaeology (Museu Nacional de Arqueologia) and the Maritime Museum (Museu da Marinha) are housed in the western wing of the Jeronimos Monastery, which had been the monks’ dormitory. Lisbon’s Naval Planetarium, an adjunct to the Maritime Museum, is located nearby. I would have been happy to explore all of these, but the time available limited us to visiting the Church of Santa Maria de Belém. It was a good choice, because the Church proved to be an artistic wonderland.

We entered the Church through its west portal, the main entrance, at the rear of the church, which is aligned east-west, with the choir and altar at the east; there is also a south entrance, which is quite spectacular, but it was closed.

The original architect, Diogo Boitac, designed a three-aisled structure with five bays (recesses) under a vaulted ceiling. In 1517 a Spanish architect, Juan de Castillo, took over; he was responsible for providing the church with a unique single-span ribbed vault supported by six slender columns, 25-metres (82 feet) high, decorated with ornate floral elements in Renaissance style.

Castillo also discarded Boitac’s plan for a three-bay transept with supports in favor of a bold, innovative single-vaulted transept unsupported by any piers or columns. The result is considered a masterpiece, one of the finest examples of Manueline architecture.

This impression only deepened as we moved through the church. The nave or central section, where the congregation sits, is of the same height as the aisles to either side of it, enhancing the spacious appearance of the church. At the east end is the chancel or sanctuary, the section of the church reserved for choir and clergy, separated from the nave by steps. The chancel also contains the tombs of King Manuel I and his successor King João (John) III and their wives.

I am fond of stained-glass windows. The Church of Santa Maria de Belem, being a Late Gothic/Renaissance edifice, has a number of them and Sandie and I tried to photograph as many as we could.

Santa Maria has an organ, which is nothing special as organs go, but it sits underneath a splendid stained-glass window and next to the glorious south transept. Castillo’s unsupported transept vault, lacking support by piers or columns, gives the impression of floating in the air.

At the ends of both aisles are alcoves with altars and images of religious figures such as Christ, the Virgin Mary, and St. Jerome.

In the lower choir, near the end of each aisle, are the stone tombs of Vasco da Gama and of Luis Vaz de Camões, considered Portugal’s greatest poet, who celebrated the voyages of discovery in his epic Os Lusiades.  The tombs are the work of a later age, carved in the late nineteenth century by the sculptor Costa Mota, but in a neo-Manueline style that blends in seamlessly with the rest of the monastery. Vasco da Gama’s remains were relocated to his Jerónimos Monastery tomb in 1880. The same was ostensibly done for the remains of Camões, except that they had been lost in the earthquake of 1755, so the bones in Camões’ tomb are almost certainly someone else’s.

Sandie and I flew into Lisbon on the morning of November 4 and were met by a jovial native of Madrid named Manuel Sueiras, who would be our tour leader. He dropped us off at our hotel, the Novotel Lisboa, and encouraged us to start seeing Lisbon on our own, while he rounded up the remaining members of the tour group, who trickled in as the day wore on.

We hopped into a taxi and went to lunch in central Lisbon, somewhere on the Avenida da Liberdade, but we were too tired from the long flight to follow Manuel’s suggestion any farther, so we returned to our hotel and acquainted ourselves with its amenities, primarily the bed.

We took it easy until later in the day, when everyone assembled in the hotel lobby for our introductory meeting, followed by an inaugural banquet at a nearby restaurant, the Pano de Boca. The name translates literally to “cloth of mouth,” in other words “napkin,” or its more elegant French equivalent, “serviette.”

It was already dark when we walked to the restaurant. On the way we passed several interesting landmarks, most notably the Lisbon Central Mosque. This is a very distinctive ultra-modern structure, inaugurated in 1985, and is Europe’s third-largest mosque outside Turkey. It features a highly unusual spiral-shaped minaret. We also encountered a sinister figure, known as The Masked Malefactor, who stalks Lisbon at night; some say that he is the Portuguese equivalent of El Zorro, California’s version of Robin Hood. His photograph is included in the gallery following. But he did NOT write the graffito in the next photo, which reads “Portugal – um país venoido aos estrangeiros.” I’m not sure what the author of this oeuvre was trying to say – my best guess is “Portugal – a country sold to foreigners”. If so the fourth word should be “vendido”. But the graffitist wasn’t necessarily fully literate. Neither am I in Portuguese, but I wouldn’t make that mistake.

At the Pano de Boca the libations flowed freely and we were introduced, among other delicacies, to the Portuguese national dish, bacalhau, which is a preparation of dried, salted cod. It can be prepared in many different ways; some say there are over a thousand recipes for bacalhau. (It should be noted that Portugal is credited with the highest consumption of fish per capita in the European Union.) I enjoyed my fill of it at the Pano de Boca. I’m usually happy as long as the wine flows freely, as it did on this occasion, but it was a special treat to experience my first taste of real Portuguese cuisine.

Next day, refreshed from a night’s rest, we embarked upon our tour of Lisbon. I should mention that in each place we visited, in addition to Manuel, we had a local guide who was intimately acquainted with the attractions and expounded upon them in exquisite detail. In Lisbon our local guide was an attractive blonde woman whose name I unfortunately cannot remember, but I haven’t forgotten her vivacity and eloquence.

One of the first things to know about Lisbon, which most people aren’t aware of — though I myself am well acquainted with it from reading Voltaire’s Candide — is that on 1 November 1755, All Saints Day, Lisbon was struck, and essentially destroyed by, one of the greatest earthquakes in recorded history, a magnitude 9 temblor. The earthquake and the resulting tsunami and fires caused up to 50,000 deaths. As Voltaire noted in Candide, the earthquake struck in conjunction with an auto da fé conducted by the Portuguese Inquisition, which might have been taken to signify divine displeasure with the persecution of heretics; but that didn’t happen, any more than the destruction of the Spanish Armada in 1588 persuaded Philip II that it wasn’t part of God’s plan to suppress heresy in England and Holland. However, at least the Marquis of Pombal, who presided over the restoration of Lisbon after the earthquake, did abolish autos-da-fé in 1773, though the Portuguese Inquisition itself was not terminated until 1821.

Quite significantly, King Joseph I and his chief minister, the aforesaid Marquis de Pombal, saw the destruction as an opportunity to build a new city free of the constraints of its medieval inheritance; they adopted a design which envisioned expansive public squares linked by broad avenues, lined with structures built to be earthquake-resistant. The results were enduring, and the present appearance of Lisbon can in large part be traced back to the Pombaline rebuilding of the 18th century.

We first visited a relatively low-key, indeed almost tranquil, location – the Parque Eduardo VII, or King Edward VII Park. The eponymous king was not Portuguese but English, and the park was named for him because of a visit he made to Lisbon in 1903 to reinforce Anglo-Portuguese relations and reaffirm a long alliance between the two countries — Britain having been Portugal’s staunch ally against France during the Napoleonic Wars a century earlier. The park constitutes a long north-south rectangle, at the north end of which is an observation deck with an expansive vista southward down to the Tagus River. There also is a monument, Ao 25 de Abril (“To the 25th of April”), which commemorates the Carnation Revolution of 1974, when the authoritarian Estado Novo regime was overthrown. Over it flies the largest Portuguese flag in the world.

At the south end of the park stands a monument to Sebastião José de Carvalho e Melo, the Marquis of Pombal. He was a scion of the country gentry who rose from obscurity to become head of the diplomatic service, and eventually the chief minister of King Joseph I (r. 1750 – 1777). He secured his pre-eminence primarily by his management of Lisbon’s recovery from the earthquake of 1755. He was for the most part a proponent of the 18th-century Enlightenment, and implemented significant reforms, over the opposition of reactionary aristocrats. He also gave his name to the style of architecture associated with the reconstruction of Lisbon. We encountered numerous examples of Pombaline architecture during our excursions around the city.

Present-day Lisbon has a population of half a million (545,000) within the city limits, but the greater Lisbon area is home to over three million. It is patently one of the great cities of the world, one of the oldest European capitals, and was the hub of a great colonial and commercial empire from the sixteenth century down to the mid-twentieth. For my part, I found it to be a beautiful, prosperous and richly endowed metropolis. Before moving on to focus on the specific major attractions, I’m presenting a panoply of random landmarks and scenes Sandie and I captured on camera – mostly from the windows of our tour bus – as we wended our way around the city.

I’ll make just a couple of notes on these random shots. The Ponte 25 de Avril, or 25 April Bridge, spanning the Tagus River, was built in 1966 and originally named for Antonio de Oliveira Salazar, who ruled as dictator of Portugal from 1932 to 1968. Salazar died in 1968 and his Novo Estado regime was eventually overthrown in the Carnation Revolution of April 25, 1974, so called because people drove out Salazar’s successors by throwing carnations at them, just like Pepperland citizens got rid of the Blue Meanies in the Beatles movie “Yellow Submarine.” The Salazar bridge was then renamed the 25 April Bridge. Later another bridge was built across the Tagus, a much longer one, upstream of the 25 April Bridge; it is named after Vasco Da Gama.

We frequently encountered election posters sporting the hammer and sickle of the Communist Party of Portugal. I remarked to our guide that I thought we had pulled all the Commies’ arms and legs off at the end of the Cold War, but she informed me that Portugal still has a vibrant and vital Communist Party. (I don’t recall seeing any such posters in Spain, though.)

From King Edward VII Park, we moved on to the Belém district, the site of some of Lisbon’s most famous and historic monuments. The most iconic, one that is always pictured in travelogues (including this one), is the Torre de Belém, officially the Torre de São Vicente.  It was built by order of King Manuel I (1469-1521), as a fortification to reinforce the defenses of Lisbon at the mouth of the Tagus River, and completed in 1519. It proved its worth, or lack thereof, in the succession crisis of 1580. Two years prior, in 1578, Sebastian I, the childless King of Portugal, had foolishly undertaken a crusade in Morocco and was killed in battle. His uncle, who succeeded him as king, was a cardinal of the Roman Catholic church, and died two years later, also leaving no heirs. King Philip II of Spain, whose mother was a Portuguese princess, then claimed the throne and sent the Duke of Alva with an army to enforce his claim. The garrison of the Torre de Belém surrendered after only a few hours of resistance, causing Philip II to refer to it as “useless” and order plans drawn up to replace it with something more substantial (which never materialized). From that time the Torre was used as a prison until 1830. In the later 19th century it fell into decrepitude, but was extensively restored in the 20th.

The Belém Tower was originally built on a small island in the Tagus, just off the riverbank, but in the centuries since then development has moved the shoreline toward the island, so that it now appears to be a mere peninsula, or rather peninsulette (if that’s a word). Along with the Jeronimos Monastery and a few other sites (most of the rest having been leveled by the 1755 earthquake), the tower is considered one of the principal examples of Manueline architecture (King Manuel I having been its chief sponsor), a sumptuous style characterized by complex ornamentation in portals, windows, columns and arcades. Starting with Portuguese Late Gothic, it incorporates elements of various other styles, and initiates a transition to Renaissance architecture.

The line to get into the Tower was rather long, and one woman apparently tried to circumvent it by using her cloak as a parasail. It didn’t work.

The Torre de Belém is on the north bank of the Tagus; from there we had a wonderful view of the river and is south bank. It was easy to imagine Vasco da Gama departing in his caravel on the voyage that would take him to India, initiate a global colonial empire, and establish Lisbon as one of the great commercial centers of the world.

A short walk from the Torre de Belém one encounters what looks like an old biplane equipped with floats to land in the water. This is a British-made Fairey III-D Mark II seaplane named the Lusitania (“Lusitania” is the Latin name for Portugal). It serves as a monument to Gago Coutinho and Sacadura Cabral, two Portuguese aviators who completed the first aerial crossing of the South Atlantic Ocean in 1922. They set out from a naval air station near Belém Tower and island-hopped over the Canaries and other Atlantic islands toward Brazil. Upon reaching the first islands in Brazilian waters, they tried to land in rough seas, but the plane sank. Fortunately, the aviators were saved by a Portuguese cruiser which had been sent to support the mission. Another Fairey III, named the Pátria, was sent from Portugal, and they were able to resume the journey. Unfortunately, engine failure brought them down again in the middle of the ocean, and the Pátria was lost; this time they were rescued by a British cargo ship. This time the Portuguese government dispatched a third Fairey III, the Santa Cruz , aboard another Portuguese cruiser. After it arrived they resumed their journey, and the third time proved to be the charm. They made landfall at Recife, Brazil, and flew on to Rio de Janeiro, arriving on 17 June 1922, arriving two and a half months after their departure on March 30. The Santa Cruz, the only one of the three planes to survive the journey,  is now housed in Lisbon’s Maritime Museum, which we did not visit; a very realistic replica of the original Lusitania was made to put on display near Belém Tower.

I can’t help but marvel that less than half a century after the first aerial crossing of the South Atlantic, jet airplanes were making nonstop flights across entire oceans and continents, whereas four centuries separated the first circumnavigation of the globe and the invention of the airplane, and thousands of years lapsed between the invention of the sail and the voyages of Columbus and Magellan. Technological progress has accelerated at an astounding pace. Will it continue to do so, and if so, what will the future be like?

A propos of voyages, no less significant than those of Columbus and Magellan were those of the Portuguese, who began the Age of Discovery and were the first actually to reach the East Indies. Their exploits are commemorated with the Padrão dos Descobrimentos, or Monument to the Discoveries, which stands a little way down the shoreline to the east of the Tower of Belém. Unlike the Tower, it is a modern creation, originating in 1939, when a temporary version was created for an exhibition celebrating the 800th anniversary of the founding of Portugal and the 300th anniversary of the restoration of its independence from Spain. That version was demolished after the exhibition closed, but a larger version was completed in 1960 in connection with the commemoration of the 500th anniversary of the death of Prince Henry the Navigator (1394-1460), who sponsored the early Portuguese voyages of discovery.

Both the original and the current versions of the monument are the work of the Novo Estado regime of Antonio Salazar, and as such are an idealized version of the Age of Discovery, glossing over the myriad hardships suffered by the explorers during their voyages, not to mention the torments they inflicted on the peoples they encountered. The monument is a huge concrete slab, 52 meters (171 feet) high; it takes the stylized form of a caravel, the type of ship used in the early explorations. The base represents the hull of the ship, with a statue of Prince Henry standing in front, and the top of the monument depicts the sails. Lining the sides of the “hull” are statues of various significant figures connected with the voyages of discovery, including Bartolomeu Dias, discoverer of the Cape of Good Hope, Vasco da Gama, discoverer of the sea route to India, Luis Vaz de Camões (Portugal’s greatest poet, who celebrated da Gama’s voyages in his epic poem Os Lusiades), Ferdinand Magellan (who was Portuguese, though he sailed under the flag of Spain), and Pedro Cabral, discoverer of Brazil. There are 33 figures in all; in addition to the major explorers, they include members of the Portuguese royal family, scientists, artists, cartographers, and missionaries. Some of the people represented are only remotely connected with the discoveries, such as Philippa of Lancaster, an English princess who in 1387 married King John I of Portugal, thereby becoming Queen of Portugal. The marriage cemented what was to become an enduring alliance between England and Portugal. Queen Philippa was also the mother of Prince Henry the Navigator.

I didn’t realize it at the time, but the monument is hollow and contains a 101-seat auditorium, a theater and several exhibit halls, as well as a staircase affording access to the top of the monument. We didn’t know that because for some reason the interior was closed the day that we were there; otherwise I would have attempted to climb to the top and photograph the great views that are available there.

We did however enjoy the open square on the north side of the monument, which features a Rosa-dos-Ventos (compass rose) 50 meters (160 feet) in diameter, with a 14-meter (45 feet) wide mappa mundi depicting the routes of the voyages of discovery. The cost of constructing the square was donated by the government of the Union of South Africa. Different types and colors of limestone, including a rare variety found only in Sintra – a town north of Lisbon, which we visited in the afternoon – were used to pave the square and constitute the compass rose. The result, to me, is a work of stunning elegance, which I was unable to capture with my camera in its full glory because I had no tear gas grenades handy to clear away all the people on the square who churlishly thronged on it, blocking the view.

Looking west down the north bank of the Tagus from the Padrão dos Descobrimentos, we caught sight of the Museo de Arte Popular (on the right in the picture below) and the tall Farol de Belém (Belem Lighthouse), with the Torre de Belém between them.

Across the Tagus River, just to the right of the southern terminus of the 25 April Bridge, we caught sight of a tall structure with what looked like a cross on top. The cross turned out actually to be a statue depicting Christ with arms stretched wide, as if to embrace the city of Lisbon. The statue is 28 meters/92 feet tall and stands on a pedestal 82 meters/160 feet high. It is part of a complex known as the Santuário de Cristo Rei (Sanctuary of Christ the King), which itself stands on a hilltop 133 meters/436 feet above the Tagus. It was built in the 1950s as an expression of gratitude by the Portuguese for having been spared the horrors of World War II. The monument has been compared to the statue of Christ the Redeemer atop Corcovado Mountain in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, which was its inspiration.

Our next stop, after the Padrão, was the Mosteiro dos Jerónimos (Jerónimos Monastery), another landmark associated with the Voyages of Discovery. Since this post is already overly long and cumbersome, I’ll start a new one to accommodate the proliferation of photos we took there.