Visitors to Lisbon will find warm sunshine and warmer people. No travel guide is required to know that. The reputation of the city’s residents is too well known. But what tourists may not know is that this city on Europe’s west coast is also home to more things to see and do than could possibly […]

The Jardim Botânico and the Museu Nacional de História Natural offer the Lisbon tourist a place of both peace and fascination in this bustling Portuguese metropolis. Filled with interesting sights from the natural world, here one can feed the mind and replenish the spirit during a visit to this busy city. Lisbon’s botanic garden is […]

The Museu Nacional dos Coches in Lisbon is one of this Portuguese city’s premier attractions. It isn’t hard to see why. It’s filled with sights that can be seen nowhere else in the world. The museum displays a wide variety of coaches from the 16th through the 19th centuries, along with much of the associated […]

Only half an hour outside Lisbon lies one of the most fascinating sights of this already spectacular area of Portugal: Sintra. Set atop craggy ridges lies the palace that looks down on the town below. Centuries ago the Moors fortified the area leaving the Castelo dos Mouros to look down on the town. The Palácio […]

Fado is to Portugal what flamenco is to Spain: a cultural symbol. But there, for the most part, the similarities end. While flamenco is energetic and vigorous, equal parts music and dance, fado is soulful. This native form of music arose as a confluence of several sources: from the Lundum of Brazil, the songs of […]

On the eastern side of Lisbon, Portugal sits a waterfront area that was once an eyesore. An oil refinery, a seaplane terminal and other downtrodden structures dotted the wharf. But with the coming of the Expo ’98, a World Fair hosting 130 countries, the entire area underwent a revitalization. Today, visitors from all over the […]

The Gulbenkian, as it’s popularly known, is Lisbon’s premier art museum. The museum is named after an Armenian oil entrepreneur active in the early 20th century. After making his fortune trading in oil in Turkey, Iran and elsewhere he began to gather an art collection comprised of a wide variety of styles. Egyptian, Greek, Roman, […]

Legend has it that a pilgrim on his way to Santiago de Compostela stopped in Barcelos centuries ago. He had the misfortune of being accused of theft. In court, he declared that if the cooked rooster the judge was about to eat stood up and crowed this would prove his innocence. It did, and he […]

Despite the word ‘Jardim’ in the title, the Lisbon zoo is all about the animals. Small by international standards there are nevertheless over 2,000 animals ranging over 400 species housed here. Lions roam a large display and make their presence known in a city full of distractions. Several other large cats, leopards and tigers prominently, […]

The roots of Lisbon go back centuries. As far back as the 4th century, it was a bishopric of the nascent Catholic Church. But unlike many European cities, the history of Lisbon took an odd turn. It was conquered by Muslim invaders in the 8th century, an occupation that lasted for nearly 400 years. The […]