… is a sprawling metropolis along the wide River Tagus … a 7 hour visit is ridiculously short for one of the oldest cities in Europe, so we just touched the historic city centre …

Arriving early we went straight to where all the important people have arrived … kings, queens, conquerors, explorers, pirates … and Jan …

… in front of this impressive square …

… boasting all the usual adornments of huge European Squares.

Through the arch to Rua Augusta, the main shopping/pedestrian street. Is anyone awake at 8am?

We walked on …

… found many more impressive plazas …

… and streets with not much happening …

We ducked in for a quick look at many churches. They all start to look the same after a while, but the number of them, and the dominance over the people that they represent, really is a major head scratcher.

Many of the streets are of granite cobblestones, but there’s an enormous amount of marble just lying about. Like these stairs …

… and this … marble footpath, gutter blocks, and even the white of the pedestrian crossing!!!

After a while we took a break in one of the many cafes (some going back to the 1800’s) …

… and Jan had to have a Portuguese custard tart …

Many old bulidings are elaborately decorated with ceramic tiles or painted bright colours …

Later, we found this huge church, where the stone roof fell in in a big earthquake at 9:25 on a Sunday morning in 1755 … this quake destroyed a lot of the city (including all the big church congregation of course!)

We made our way back to Rua Augusta … awake now …

… and the shops were open … (do all shops have magnets tuned in to Jan’s DNA???)

We then moved on back towards the ship, up to the top of the Alfama district … we could have caught one of the little old 4 wheel trams up the hill instead … hmmmm …

This is the oldest (Moorish) part of town … recently a den of thieves, vagabonds and iniquity, but now UNESCO listed and cleaned up (a bit?). We made our way down the steep stepped “streets” …

… and an occasional little plaza …

… to the ship at the bottom …

… and sailed away. Lisbon deserved (a lot) more time.