Castles in Spain .... sorry, Portugal

At Montmor-o-Velho our bus passed by a huge ruined fortress and we took time out to inspect. It's impressive - have a look. And the views out over the countryside are also pretty.

AS

Older than Cambridge University?

After three nights in Lisbon, it was time to take to the road heading towards Porto for the second half of the conference. And, as the next three posts suggest, this was some trip! First stop was Coimbra, perhaps Portugal's ancient heart. And the key focus was on the university of Coimbra, one of the oldest and grandest in Europe. We were all simply blown away! It was simply stunning. Let's have a look at some pictures of this grand institution and its beautiful surroundings. On the way there. the countryside was attractive - central Portugal is much more mountainous than I expected.

The university is perched high on a hill-top.

And its core contains a constellation of elegant and ancient buildings, some going back perhaps 700 years. And many of them have ornate inscriptions or decorations.

There are, like Cambridge, some elegant walkways.

But the gorgeous palatial rooms at the centre were breathtaking - and they are, in fact, part of the palace of the Portuguese royal family.

 

 One thing that caught my attention was the cell-block where recalcitrant students were imprisoned for anything from a day or two (maybe for being drunk or disorderly) to lengthier confinement for such crimes as missing classes, forgetting assignments, or maybe being rude to their lecturers. The cells were small, but not damp as with some dungeons!

At this point, I'd love to show some pictures of the magnificent old library, but photography was barred for good reason. In a way, the old library was far more ornate and prestigious than any old baroque cathedral or palace. It probably puts such grand buildings as Rome's Sistine chapel in the shade. And why? Well, there's the over-the-top woodwork, the lovely ceiling, the gilt leaf, and so on. The leaf is made out of pure gold and there's masses of it, making this structure possibly the most expensive in the world per unit volume. It appears that, at the time of construction, the Portuguese king received about 20% of the gold mined in Brasil and a lot of it went on the library. Wow! Also impressive was the number of books (about 40,000) many of which date back centuries. As far as I could gather, the collection had no volumes later than the 19th century, but they could be borrowed if needed. The other stunning features of this library were its pest and temperature control systems (the former preventing insects and other creepy crawlies eating away at the volumes stocked). Don't laugh. What's coming is true. The library housed a colony of bats!!!!!!! They roost behind some of the bookshelves and fly out mainly at night to forage.

The views from the high points of the campus over the city were also delightful:

And, heaven knows what these guys were up to - some impromptu dance routine in the quadrangle.

Some more views of the city itself:

And, shortly after we departed, some lunch. and our host wore some interesting costum!

AS

On the Fringes of Lisbon

One of the most attractive features of the international geographical union commission concerning rural development - of which I am a part - is not just the large number of international friends I have made from all continents, but also the insights the fieldwork aspect has yielded for my own work. Also, I have gained a deeper understanding of how various countries approach their development of rural regions - and there are some big differences between them.

Anyway, after a morning session of paper-giving at the New University of Lisbon, we leapt on board a bus to take us out to the eastern fringe of Lisbon to look at land use conflicts in the jurisdiction of Loures, a local government region that hosted us. Here are some of the images we saw, including a rather lovely cultural event.

The first stop was the council building where we learned a bit about the development conflicts arising where city meets country. Here we are looking at a large plan of the region. And something of the tension emerged when we visited the largish horticultural business pictured. Of course, town and country are competing for water in a region that's dry for critical parts of the year. However, the farm was being a good citizen in capturing, storing, using and re-cycling scarce water.

Country can also power up urban development using renewable sources.

We also visited a local museum that presented a somewhat different battle - Wellington's Peninsula campaign. He was appreciated by the locals for having repulsed the French and finally ejecting them from Portugal and Spain. I tactfully didn't ask my French colleague, Lucette Laurens, what she thought of this exhibit, which somewhat dented La Gloire.

The museum also dealt with the history of wine production locally - and other aspects of production.

And, of course, we headed for a local vineyard - shown here - for an obligatory tasting. We visited so many vineyards that I lost count, both from the number of farms and the several bottles of booze consumed! Perhaps that's unkind. The wines were usually very good.

This vineyard offered some delightful entertainment reflecting traditional local culture performed by whole families dressed in period costumes.

The dancers and musicians performed a wide variety of routines and the little kids played games like leap-frog. Some of our party then joined in, but I remained on the sidelines taking pictures. Of course, my dancing skills are akin to elephants dancing on egg-shells!

As evening was approaching we boarded the bus back to Lisbon.

AS

Fado Concert

After the first day of my conference in Lisbon, our hosts organised an evening banquet so that we could interact socially. But remarkably they started with a concert. In fact, I shouldn't have been surprised because many of our meetings have delightful musical proceedings: harpsichord or harp recitals, Japanese and Buddhist drumming, Mozart's sacred music, and so on. This time we had a Fado concert - Portuguese folk music, with sometimes sorrowful tone. The four performers, including two singers, shown here, were excellent.

AS

Interesting Journey

When I undertake an interesting journey I usually add heaps of photos. Not today. Unfortunately, my cameras were locked away in my case in the hold of the aircraft, so retrieval was impossible at 11,000 m above ground and travelling at mach 0.8.

So you'll just have accept a list of interesting sights / sites. The first came a while after lift-off from DUBAI. The gulf was stinking hot and very clammy and we were given a reading of c. 38 degrees C at 6 am. The route took us past the Burj Khalifa, which if you don't know is momentarily the tallest structure in the world. Look it up on the internet. It's an impressive structure and I'd love to take a ride to the top.

Next came the empty quarter of Saudi Arabia. Miles and miles of nothing except dunes and a few craggy surface rocks. There was no vegetation, nor any evidence of human presence, and no feed for camels, which I presume is why Australia has more camels than the Saudis..

The we zoomed past the port of Aquaba (on the other side of the aircraft, but at least I saw the gulf itself. Blue sea water separated two desert shorelines. Then came the head of the Red Sea and a queue of ships awaiting their turn through the Suez canal (Suez was also on the other side of the aircraft)

Them it was it was our turn to see a wondrous site (or rather several amazing images). First came the River Nile, with a swathe of irrigated agriculture snaking southward towards middle Egypt on either side. After that, our plane passed right over the centre of Cairo - a seeming jumble of grey buildings below. After peering into the gloom for a while, I spotted the Pyramids - only visible from our side,l though the Sphinx eluded me at 11,000+ meters. We passed across the Nile delta and Alexandria awash (if that's the right term) with small irrigated and very green plots before heading out over the Mediterranean sea. In fact the southern shoreline of the Mediterranean cam back into view occasionally and we passed at one stage right over the top of Tunis and, later, we saw the feint image of Algiers. At other time we seemed to be well out into the Sea and at one stage the whole island state of Malta lay along side my window seat. Next it was the whole Spanish Island of Ibiza.

After heading across the Spanish east coast near Valencia, we across the very dry and brown centre of that country with heaps of small fields which looked rather uneconomic to me. Finally our route took us close to Evora in Portugal, which I visited last and, after swinging out over the Atlantic Ocean our plane made a majestic fly-past up the Tagus to the airport and I could see many of the sights of central Lisbon including the famous statue of Magellan.

All in all it was a riveting journey, though it took nearly 7 hours and also allowed me to finish my presentation for the conference I'm attending starting in a few minutes!

AS

Second Snowfall

Last week, the weather was horrible, with freezing days, grey cloud and some snow. Admittedly the snow didn't last long on the ground and each dump of the white stuff was much less than in the Blue Mountains west of Sydney .. or the Southern Highlands. The ski season in the Snowies has been fantastic, and lots of Sydneysiders have driven up into the Blue Mountains to toboggan and throw snowballs at each other.

Early in the week we had the thrill of one snowy day, but what we didn't expect was a second even a few days later, as shown here. There was more snow in the second event and conditions were exacerbated by gale-force winds and a huge wind-chill factor. Indeed, after allowing for the wind-chill factor the day's temperature did not exceed -5 degrees C!!

These pictures show more snow than my previous post - but not enough to last long or give complete coverage of the ground and the third picture attempt to show the snow falling ... not very successfully.

By the way, the temperature in Darwin is still 30 degrees + every day. And today in Armidale the weather is lovely - gentle breezes, wall to wall sunshine, and temperatures back to + 13 C. I've been riding my bike wearing shorts ... all very pleasant.

AS