Everywhere we visited in Portugal had some cobbled streets with patterns or shapes in them and it was a feature that I particularly liked. The old town of Aveiro was no exception.
Aveiro is also known as the Venice of Portugal and is crossed by a network of channels through which local boats meander. These colourful boats were originally used to collect algae and seaweed, but are just used for sightseeing trips now. By the side of one of these canals is a street full of colourful houses too.
Crossing these canals are numerous bridges, and some of these are festooned with ribbons. Like many places in the world this idea started with lovers attaching padlocks to them, but bridges were never built to withstand the weight of hundreds of them. In Aveiro the padlocks were removed and people started tying ribbons instead. It certainly makes a much more colourful display.
I couldn’t resist trying some intentional motion blur photos and here’s one that I like.
There were even ribbons hanging across one of the streets.
The pleasure of meandering somewhere new on foot is that whenever you come across something interesting you can stop to enjoy it. This enormous statue was in a little square opposite a church.
For those of you who’ve seen my images before, you’ll know that I do like old windows, doors and stairs!
Depending on who you ask, Nazaré is known as the surfing capital of Europe. Famous for its Nazaré Canyon, an underwater ravine produces some the biggest waves ever ridden. The average wave height in winter is about 50 feet, but can reach over 100 feet on big days. We made a slight detour on our way back down to Lisbon to see if there were any big waves that day. They were the biggest I’ve seen, but not anywhere near as big as they can be, and nobody was surfing. We weren’t down on the beach as we’d read that the best viewing point was on a cliff, but I think the waves would have seemed to be much bigger from a lower vantage point.
The image below has nothing to show the scale and looks like the wave is only a few feet high, but they were estimated to be 15-20 feet that day.
That concludes a two week tour of Portugal!
