Lisbon

This was the great Sheffield excursion of April 2000 to visit Stephen. He'd been a stout supporter of our local pub quiz team, so we were sad to see him leave but determined to use him as an excuse for a short holiday! Here is a picture showing the members of our party (except your faithful photographer)

I'm waiting for some photos taken by others to fill in any gaps, but here's mine for now together with a bit of a holiday diary - the shortened form of course!

We arrived early evening on Saturday the 8th, leaving the glorious sunshine of England to find out it can rain quite happily in Portugal, and in fact is pretty good at it! It was still raining on Sunday morning, but cleared up fairly quickly.

Our hotel in the "leafy square"

This is the Elevador de Santa Justa. It is 32m high and connects the lower and upper parts of the city

Walking down the pedestrianised street - the mosaics you can see are typical of the streets.

"The impressive trumphal arch on the north side of the square leads into Rua Augusta" - or so it says in my guidebook! My version of it is that we came down the street through this arch into the Praça do Comércio. Apparantly the king's horse is trampling on snakes, but we'd welcome anyideas on the relevance of the elephant on the side of the statue!

Our first view of the "mighty" (you had to be there) Tejo. You can also see the Golden Gate Bridge (strictly the Ponte 25 de Abril if you want to be picky) and the statue of Christ from Rio.

I was really only taking a photo of the palm trees (which held a strange fascination for me!) but everyone assumed I was pointing the camera at them, so I had to take the next picture too. I'd love to know what Elaine has just asked Rob! :)

We took the scenic walk up to the castle, including stopping to pose for a few photos!

You can see right in the middle the Igreja do Carmo. The arches of the Carmelite church were left by the earthquake of 1755.

Looking back over to the river and the Praça do Comércio.

The castle:

I suppose it was still 2000. An example of some of the many steps of Lisbon.

One of the funiculars (the Elevador do Glória?)

Aly looking rather blurred

Three cable-car views. The cable runs along the river's edge, at the Expo98 site.

The castle, viewed from lower down in the city.

After Stephen went back, we spent the next day in Sintra, famous for its views:

That night we went to a traditional Fado restaurant. Somebody was selling paper snakes...

After leaving Rob, Elaine and Aly to go back to work (shame!), Kerstin and I spent the rest of the week wandering Portugal - well parts of it anyway! Check out the waterfall at the bottom of the gorge... It was a bugger to find but worth the effort (maybe we should write to the Rough Guide and "suggest" they alter their directions :)

Some stones

We spent a fair time driving the Algarve and West coasts. I've lumped together various bits of scenery... The first three are on the beach on the Ilha de Tavira which is an island off Tavira. Because we were there off season, the several miles of beach had about 6 people on!

A couple of nice sunset views from Porto Covo on the last night in Portugal. Someone deep in thought! There were a few other "person in front of sunset" pictures, but they have been hidden for the good of mankind (ask Kerstin to show you, I wouldn't dare even if I had copies :)

And on the drive back to Lisbon, we finally went over the Ponte de Vasco da Gama bridge! Note the weather, it finally started raining again. You can also see the inside of Pele, our trusty hire car.