Lisbon, Portugal

I arrived in Coimbra on Friday and on Saturday, Anna and I took the train a short two hours down to Lisbon, where we stayed overnight. It's a capital city, for sure, but Lisbon felt really small and intimate to me. We really only explored the older city center, and I could see on the map that the business and residential parts of the city spread out quite a bit, but the little city center felt complete, like a city in itself. There were lots of shops, cafés, restaurants and pedestrian streets.

 this is the Casa dos Bicos, the House of Beaks, or in French, the House of Diamonds

 the whole facade is covered in little pointy pyramids

 all the sidewalks and some of the streets in Coimbra, Lisbon and Porto were cobbled with these types of little black and white stones, arranged to make simple or detailed patterns

 Lisbon is said to be the city on seven hills

here's one place where you can take several steep flights of stairs up one of the hills

The Carmo church lost its roof during the great earthquake of 1755 and was never repaired

it's a really striking image!

we visited the Mosteiro dos Jerónimos, the Jerónimos Monastery

the elaborate architectural style is Manueline, named after King Manuel I from the early 16th century, and is very rich and easily identifiable

 the huge chapel of the monastery

 the outside of the monastery

outside the chapel

 the Padrão dos Descobrimentos, the Monument to the Discoveries

built for the Portuguese World's Fair and then used as a piece of fascist propaganda promoting the power and importance of Portugal's navigators

 the Torre de Belém, the Belém Tower, once acted as a first line of defense for Lisbon where the Tagus River meets the Atlantic ocean

 the Sé of Lisbon

 view over Lisbon and the Tagus from the Moorish hilltop castle, the Castelo São Jorge

across the river you can see the Cristo Rei statue inspired by the one in Brazil