Entries tagged with: lisbon
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Traveling from Lisbon to Madeira
FROM LISBON TO MADEIRA. My allotted week in Lisbon came to an end only too soon: in the society of friends, and in the Camonian room (Bibliotheca Nacional), which contains nearly 300 volumes, I should greatly have enjoyed a month. The s.s. Luso (Captain Silva), of the ’Empresa Insulana,’ one of the very few Portuguese steamers, announced her departure for December 20; and I found myself on board early in the morning, with a small but highly select escort to give me God-speed. Unfortunately the ’May weather’ had made way for the cacimbas (mists) of a rainy sou’-wester. The bar broke and roared at us; Cintra, the apex of Lisbon’s extinct volcano and the Mountain of the (Sun and) Moon, hid her beautiful head, and even the Rock of Lisbon disdained the normal display of sturdy flank. Then set in a brise carabinée, which lasted during our voyage of 525...
Posted on May 31, 2007 3:12 PM
A Week in Libson
I spent a pleasant week at Lisbon, and had a fair opportunity of measuring what progress she has made during the last sixteen years. We have no longer to wander up and down disconsolate Mid many things unsightly to strange ee. If the beggars remain, the excessive dirt and the vagrant dogs have disappeared. The Tagus has a fine embankment; but the land side is occupied by mean warehouses. The sewers, like those of Trieste, still want a cloaca maxama, a general conduit of masonry running along the quay down-stream. The Rocio has been planted with mean trees, greatly to the disgust of the average Lusitanian, who hates such sun-excluding vegetation like a backwoodsman; yet the Quintella squarelet shows what fine use may be made of cactus and pandanus, aloes and palms, not to mention the ugly and useful eucalyptus. The thoroughfares are far cleaner than they were; and Lisbon...
Posted on May 30, 2007 1:12 PM
Tagus, Portugal
Next morning broke upon a lovely view: no wonder that the Tagus is the pride of Portuguese bards. The Rosicler, or rosy dawn-light, was that of a May morning–the May of poetry, not of meteorology–and the upper windows of distant Lisbon were all ablaze with the unrisen sun. It was a picture for the loveliest colours, not for ’word-painting;’ and the whole scene was classical as picturesque. We may justly say of it, ’Nullum sine nomine saxum.’ Far over the rising hills of the north bank rose shaggy Cintra, ’the most blessed spot in the habitable globe,’ with its memorious convent and its Moorish castle. The nearer heights were studded with the oldest-fashioned windmills, when the newest are found even in the Canaries; a single crest bore its baker’s dozen, mostly decapitated by steam. Advancing we remarked the glorious Belem monastery, defiled by its ignoble modern ruin to the west;...
Posted on May 30, 2007 1:10 PM
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