Sig Comes to Lisboa!!

Last week Sig came down from Norway to visit me in Lisbon. It was a nice reprieve for her from school work and the already frigid weather and snow in Trondheim. She arrived on Monday afternoon and we went downtown after we picked up some groceries. That is actually one of the fun things about being in a different country, seeing the supermarkets. Food is vastly different in every place, especially the fresh meat and vegetable counters. She did not like the look of raw octopus on ice. Fair enough, I don’t like looking at the cutlass fish…hideous little beast.

Anyways, we went downtown straight away and then headed up to a place I had never been before. The Castelo de São Jorge…

The Castle itself was conquered with the help of crusaders from northern Europe in 1147, many of them Englishmen. They were on their way to the Holy Land to fight in the Second Crusade, but stopped off to aid Afonso Henriques I, the first King of Portugal, in the Reconquista. This is arguably, the beginning of Portugal’s long alliance with England. That alliance was formalized in the Treaty of Windsor in 1386; that Treaty remains in force today and is the longest standing diplomatic alliance.

As you can imagine, with the Castle’s central role in the conquest of Lisbon from the Moors, it is shrouded in legend. The most famous of which is the story of Martim Moniz, who used his own body to prevent the Moors from closing the doors during the siege. History aside, the view of Lisbon is spectacular…

The grounds are really neat too…

It was a great start for Sig’s visit…