Our last day in Porto and Portugal and it has been a lovely stay. First up visited one if the famous Port houses, Cockburns. Funnily enough, many of the oldest and most famous are British owned and have been since the 17 and 18th centuries. The grapes are grown in the Duaro valley upstream if Porto which has unique microclimate for in this part of the world. So the story goes anyway but the port does taste good. Followed that up with a river cruise which was nice...

Arrived in Porto yesterday afternoon for a 3 night stay and what a wonderful apartment we have overlooking the Douro river, the Eiffel bridge and the famous Port houses of Portugal. Only negative was the 3 flights of very steep stairs to get up but once here as you can see from the photos, the struggle was worthwhile. Lunch last night in a restaurant was interesting with no English spoken at all. Part of the fun of travel. Porto is the second largest city in Po...

Wow what a place Sintra is. Today we toured a mansion, palace and castle that dominate the mountain towering over Sintra. The area has hundreds of chateaus and 4 palaces in the surrounding hills built from the 17th century by the very wealthy as summer houses. The Pena palace was the residence of the kings of Portugal until democratisation in 1910 and us now a museum. The castle was started in the 1100 by the Moors and built upon many others since. It and the cas...

Sitting on the train in Sintra and waiting to travel into Lisbon for the day. Since leaving Toledo we have had wifi issues so it has been a pain keep the blog going. Seville was marvellous and our accommodation was in the middle of the old Jewish quarter with narrow alleyways backing onto the Alcazar and the Cathedral. This was wonderful once we were in the apartment but finding it and the four of us dragging our bags around and around in the 37 degrees tempera...