Nazare Revisited

We did Nazare an injustice, perhaps we were tired! The port is a distance away from the town which is a local tourist spot, partly because of the great beaches, and partly because of the little local sites. It's split into 2 sections, the main town spreading inland from the beach and a clifftop village, Sitio, accessed by road (steep, ok by car) or by funicular.

The town has streets of cobbles, mostly limestone with patterns of a black rock - many of the patterns are fish. The market had lots of fish, we are beginning not to recognise any of the fish species - deep Atlantic fish perhaps.

Speaking of fish, along one stretch of the beach, there is a section for the salting and drying of fish. All manner of fish are opened out and hung up to dry, but the majority appear to be a small sardine / herring type fish - a bit like a tiny kipper. There are rack upon rack of these, in various states of curing. The ladies seem to work on them in the mornings and sit and sell those that are done in the afternoons.

After the market and little cobbled back streets, we cycled to the funicular, took the bikes up with us and padlocked them to some railings while we went to explore. The view was stupendous, walked out to the lighthouse on the cape and round the really very attractive little hill town. There is a little shrine to Our Lady of Nazare to commemorate a miracle. The local lord, Fuas Roupinho, gave chase to a roe deer on horseback in 1182. The deer went headlong over the cliff, Fuas's horse was about to follow suit, when Fuas implored Nostra Senhora to help and the horse stopped mid-leap and saved the knight's life. The little chapel is covered in tiles depicting the scene. A nice story anyway.

A weird anomaly out to sea in this area. There is an underwater canyon, a great rift in the ocean floor extending from the sea bed normally 5 km deep coming right in close to Nazare. The canyon is about 4000m deep at 50 miles out, about 1000m deep at only 10 miles and 200m deep at one mile off. The area surrounding the canyon is only about 25m so it is suddenly 10 times deeper in the rift. There are other canyons approaching Europe along this coast, but this is one of the more dramatic. Here endeth the lesson for today.