Lisbon | Andokides' Porch

May 10, 2014, We cruise into Lisbon Harbor as the sun is rising. The statue Cristo Rei, inspired by a statue in Rio de Janeiro. Cristo Rei (“Christ the King”) sits on a hill that rises 436 feet above the water. The image of Christ 92 feet tall, and he stands on a 269-foot pedestal. It’s quite impressive.

Pete and I “deboarded” and headed for a nearby commuter rail station to catch a train into the city. After a few snags finding the Lisbon Card outlet and waiting out a computer glitch so that we could purchase our cards, we boarded an electric tram and headed to the Belém Tower, an early 16th-century fortress on the Tagus River.

We spent quite a bit of time exploring Torre Belém, then headed, on foot, back toward town, passing through the plaza of the Berardo Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, and hoping to get into the Jerònimos Monastery, the burial site of Vasco da Gama.

Lines at the monastery were crazy long, fleets of tour buses like prolific creatures releasing their young. Pete and I decided to take a lunch break and to think about Plan B. As much as we wanted to see the Jerònimos Monastery, there was no sense spending the bulk of our limited time in Lisbon standing in a line.

Happily, by the time we had finished lunch, we looked over and saw that the lines at the monastery had diminished considerably; the tour buses were off to their next stop, so Pete and I headed in. It was beautiful. Opened in 1601, the monastery is enormous; the level of ornamentation throughout is staggering. A much smaller operation today than it was in 1601, much of the building has been turned over to other purposes, including a maritime museum, but the church still functions as a site of services, and the cloister is probably much as it looked in the 1600s.

After finishing at the monastery, we caught a city bus toward downtown Lisbon. For those of you keeping track, we’re now up to three transportation modes.

Time was beginning to be a consideration. We walked through part of Lisbon toward the famous Elevador da Glòria, a funicular, that carries some 3 million people a year. We stopped at several tourist shops along the way and saw some kind of interesting festival in one of the large plazas that are so common in France and Spain. When we arrived at the Elevador, it seemed we found the lines that had moved from the monastery. Given the time we had, we had to make our way back toward the ship. No funicular ride was worth being stranded in Lisbon.

We boarded the subway--that’s four transportation modes--and headed back to the commuter rail station where we caught a train back to the station near the port. There were some tense moments as we were cutting it a bit close, and the train was late leaving the station, but when we got to the ship, we realized that some of the tour buses were running late. The ship might have left without the two of us, but not without busloads of passengers.

Lisbon was the port stop that Pete and I, I believe, both felt was the one where the most was left unexplored. It was, even so, a great way to begin my first visit on the Iberian Peninsula.

For more photos of Lisbon, click here. Photos are best viewed by double clicking on the first one, then using the navigation arrows at the top of the screen to scroll through the album.