Tag Archives: Boardwalk

Day 24 – Porto (well, Matosinhos) to Vila do Conde: hot, but good

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Sunday 20 September 2026 – The 11km of the Caminho from Porto to Matosinhos have two disadvantages: they’re very dull walking; and they would make for a 33km stage to Vila do Conde, today’s destination. It’s possible to get from Porto to Matosinhos by public transport, but it takes nearly an hour, and, with temperatures once again rising into the 30s, we wanted to get started early, so Uber it was, then, at 0630 from the hotel (having taken a foraged bread-roll-and-banana breakfast in our room), and we were walking before 7am, over the river by the docks at Matosinhos.

The day had a much more “Camino” feel about it. Immediately we got out of the Uber, a lady peregrina came by; she was German, but living in Sweden, and strode out ahead of us. The first corner shop we came to had this in the window

and we saw several peregrinos during the day.

As you can see from the gallery above, we spent virtually the whole day on a boardwalk which starts just outside Matosinhos and extends most of the way to Vila do Conde. At first, though, we walked along the prom, tiddly om pom pom,

past the lighthouse and an artwork that had some kind of pretentious title I couldn’t be bothered to note.

Then the boardwalk started

and stretched virtually unbroken to our destination. It was actually broken in a couple of places, but it’s fundamentally over 15km of planking and posts, which is a significant amount of wood and a vast number of screws to hold it down. These boardwalks (passadiços) along the Senda Litoral route were built by municipal governments during the late 2000s and 2010s. They were created primarily as a soft-engineering project to prevent human foot traffic from destroying fragile coastal sand dunes and native vegetation, while simultaneously establishing safe public seaside pathways. While the Senda Litoral is an unofficial variant of the Portuguese Coastal Way rather than a medieval religious path, local councils welcomed pilgrims onto these corridors as a scenic, flat, and car-free alternative to walking the dangerous tarmac national roads out of Porto.

As the sun came up, we passed a chapel

the Capella da Boa Nova (Chapel of the new snake?). Despite the sun, there was a delicious sea mist which kept things cool for quite some way.

The boardwalk leads past the vast great Petrogal oil refinery,

and the powers that be have put various diversions along it – infoboards, exercise stations,

resting places

and the odd occasional nugget about the Caminho.

The above nugget was starkly at odds with a pilgrim office we visited further along the boardwalk

which itself was at odds with the waymark outside the cathedral which made the distance (you remember, of course) 248km. So, who knows? Not us – until we get there, when you can rest assured that I will update you on the amount we did walk, as well as the amount we should have.

Our previous experience of walking in the wilds of Portugal on a Sunday was of cafés and restaurants that were closed because it was Sunday. I’d been hoping that today, since we were basically walking along the beach through holiday resort villages, there would be places open where we could stop and get refreshment. For once, my optimism was rewarded.

At just over 5km, our qualifying distance, this place appeared beside the boardwalk. It wasn’t immediately obvious whether it was open, but we peered in and it was. By this stage, my breakfast had worn off and I was quite peckish, and Jane had the bright idea that we should order torrada (toast and butter) with our coffee, which was a stroke of genius. We got mountains of toasted local bread, butter and quince jam, accompanied by decent, hot, coffee, and it made a wonderful second breakfast. The chap who served us had a permanently harrassed expression on his face, and by the time we left it was justified, as lots of people started drifting in for their Sunday breakfasts; once again our timing was very fortunate.

The boardwalk runs by the sea, past opportunities for people to fish

and some nice little beaches, where we found that people were already set up for the day.

There was also an item of a bit more pith and moment – the Memorial Monument.

The obelisk marks the spot where the Liberal Wars (you remember them, don’t you? Of course you do!) effectively began. On 8 July 1832, a fleet organised in the Azores and commanded by King Peter IV landed an army of about 7,500 men on this beach, aiming to replace the absolutist rule of Peter’s younger brother Miguel with a modern liberal regime. The landing caught the absolutist forces by surprise, since they had expected an attack from Lisbon, and the liberals then marched on Porto, where they withstood a siege from Miguel’s forces lasting about a year. Peter IV won the day with help from the British (go, us!).

There were a couple of breaks in the boardwalk; at one stage a barrier was up and we wondered how serious its prohibition was.

Quite serious, it turned out.

But there were roads nearby to navigate around this breakage.  There was another one later on, which was a bit more serious

and which involved walking through soft sand for a short while, which is not rewarding in sandals. Doing this, we passed a guy who, again, seemed to be setting himself up for a day there.

Was his guitar to entertain himself, other beach users, or to try to busk for money? We’ll never know.

The boardwalk gave way to a more conventional centre as we passed though the fishing village of Angeiras

where there was an entirely inexplicable construction:

the Crypto Content Creator Campus was just a shack with a couple of old ladies gossiping outside it – unless, of course, they were the Crypto Content Creators…

There were various opportunities for coffee/refreshment stops, and we took up on one about every 5km. The last one was in a rather shonky, but very friendly, bar on the outskirts of Vila do Conde

where the blokes were in a back room playing pool. The coffee there was pretty terrible, but we had a beer each, which was much needed, as by this time the temperature was getting on for 30°C and we were getting very hot. From this point, we left the boardwalk and used the roads in the hope that we could find some shade; there was some available, and it was very welcome.

Before reaching the town of Vila do Conde itself, we walked a couple of kilometres through a nature reserve,

and then re-emerged onto the roads into the edge of the municipality of Azurara, which edges Vila do Conde and is a handsome place.

The church of Santa Maria de Azurara, with the Manueline style Wayside Cross outside it…

…and its pillory

The road then took us towards the town of Vila do Conde itself, which we had to reach by crossing the river. It looked at first as though the town had its own small nuclear reactor

but it’s actually a chapel, more on which later.

The bridge gives a good view of the town

and the enormous monastery and church of Santa Clara, also more of which later.

First, we had to walk through the streets of the very attractive town

to find our hotel, the Hotel Brazão, which we did eventually. By this stage, the temperature was 33°C and we were very happy to have a glass of something cold in the hotel bar whilst we waited for our room to come available. Then we had to find some lunch; with several restaurants allegedly open until 3pm, this seemed an easy task, but the first two we tried turned us away. In the end, we came upon the Cafe Patarata

where a harrassed but very competent madame bade us sit whilst she dashed about getting food to all the other people in the place. We had a really delightful meal there, although she committed the cardinal sin of making a port-and-tonic with red port.

Back at the hotel, we rested for a while and then went for a walk. Obviously. We wanted to explore that really interesting nuclear reactor chapel

but sadly it was not really open to look inside; we learned from a notice in the town that there was a local dignitary’s lying-in-state after he’d died – funeral tomorrow, so we didn’t go in; but the walk around gave us a chance to see a few other things and appreciate the age and status of the town.

Vila do Conde sits at the mouth of the Ave river. Human settlement here goes back to the pre-Roman hillfort (castro) culture, and the Romans later used the area for its river and coast. The name, “Count’s Town”, is traditionally tied to Afonso Sanches, an illegitimate son of King Dinis. He and his wife Teresa Martins Telo founded the Monastery of Santa Clara here in 1318, and the town grew around it.

Its golden age was the 16th century, when it became a major shipbuilding centre during the Age of Discoveries. That legacy is visible in a full-size replica of a 16th-century nau (carrack) built at the old shipyard.

The Manueline portal of the Igreja Matriz (parish church) dates from this period,

(We looked into the church, but a service was about to start, so I just got a grab shot of the interior.)

Later landmarks and traditions include the Santa Clara aqueduct, an enormous structure of nearly 1,000 arches built in the 18th century to supply the monastery,

and a strong bobbin-lace (rendas de bilros) tradition. There’s a statue just outside where we had lunch to mark this tradition

There’s a very handsome town square – you can just see some more arches of the aqueduct in the background.

Near the replica ship is the King João II square, which hosts several items of interest, including a huge sculpture which is called a sun dial,

but, impressive as it is, it’s not usable as such. Other statues in the park celebrate various aspects of the town’s considerable history.

That, then, was our day – a long and eventually hot one, but enjoyable and interesting. Tomorrow we stray off the Litoral route that we’ve followed today and hack across country to join the Central route at Rates. Apparently the waymarks for this transition have been removed to try to focus people’s minds on sticking to one or other routes, but we’re sticking two fingers up to this mindset and finding our own way across. It’s not a long walk – maybe 13km or so – so despite high temperatures again being forecast for the day we probably won’t have to start out in the dark. With luck we’ll find our way OK, in which case I’ll be able to regale you with tales of our (i.e. Jane’s) navigational skills. Wish us luck!

Not Bored Walker

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Saturday 1 October 2022 – Warning – lots of photos for you to wade through today!

Pinch, punch, first of the munch. (I hate assonance.) One week to go before we head back to the UK and we start our penultimate adventure, our time in Nova Scotia. As expected, yesterday, spent as it was in travelling two time zones eastwards from Winnipeg to Halifax, was entirely devoid of anything worth telling you about with the possible exception of the taxi ride from Halifax airport to our hotel. The (somewhat elderly) taxi driver started out being courteous and interesting and ended up ranting about the incompetence of government and the unfairness of taxes. He also delivered us to the wrong hotel, but was good enough to apologise and drive us to the right one.

So, today we found ourselves in the capital city of Nova Scotia with reasonable weather in prospect, so there was only one thing for it, which was to go for a walk. Obviously.

We had a chat with a very nice chap at the concierge desk, Tim. One thing we wanted to understand was whether there was a tall building which would give us a view over the city. Our thought was that it would be nice to be able to look down over the Citadel, which is a star-shaped fortress, to appreciate its shape. Tim suggested we go with him; he took us to the top floor of the hotel and unlocked the banqueting suite there, proudly telling us that this was the banqueting facility with the best view in the city. To be fair, it was not at all bad.

It didn’t however, give us the view over the citadel that we’d really have liked, but it did have an interesting ceiling with some great chandeliers.

The other nugget that we learned from Tim was that Halifax has its own (modest) equivalent of Toronto’s underground city, although here it’s overhead rather than underground. It’s called the Pedway, and you can see one of its aerial corridors crossing the road in the second of the view photos above. Of course we had to go and explore it. As with Toronto and Montreal, it’s linkways between halls, with some stores and eateries,

but is still in development – there are many hoardings promising a bright future with more stores to be opened.

It also gave us a view back to our hotel – you can see the inward-sloping windows of the banqueting suite at the top of it.

We also had a chat with Tim about the hotel, which is a curious mix of modern and dowdy, more old-fashioned areas (e.g. the wing where we have our room). It turns out that a complex set of circumstances involving mergers, takeovers, divestitures and pandemics means that planned improvements have not yet started.

Anyhow, we had more of the city to explore, so we headed out to wander about according to the plan that Jane had formulated. We passed City Hall

which overlooks the Grand Parade.

As you might infer from the picture above, an event was brewing in the Grand Parade, involving people of African-Canadian extraction, dressed in their finery and setting up a sound deck. Their mood was jolly and we hope they had a good time, but we had a city to explore so had to move on. Before we did, though, I took a picture of a mural that overlooked a building site

and the City Clock.

Behind the clock above, you can see a hill, atop which is the historic Halifax Citadel (climbing it also gives a nice view over the city’s impressive – but closed for maintenance – Angus L. Macdonald Bridge and the Clock).

We decided to visit the Citadel, as they offered a decently low entry price for us two old people, and so began to appreciate that Halifax has a great historical richness. The Citadel was first established in 1749, and the present citadel, built starting in 1828, is actually the fourth fortification built on the site.

The citadel’s fortifications were built and rebuilt to defend the town from various enemies – the indigenous Mi’kmaq and Acadians, for example, raided the capital region (Halifax and Dartmouth) 12 times, four times against Halifax itself. While never attacked, the Citadel was long the keystone to defence of the strategically important Halifax Harbour and its Royal Navy Dockyard.

The present citadel took thirty years to build and the general introduction of rifled artillery (with greater range and accuracy than earlier guns) shortly after its completion rendered the costly installation obsolescent. It was partially rearmed in the 1860s and 1870s, and continued in use as a barracks into the 20th century.

It is easy to understand its superb strategic location, overlooking the original town and harbour. It’s a very well-maintained institution, staffed with people dressed in period costumes who can tell you about various facets of life there in the 18th Century.

The central courtyard

is littered with cannons

as are the ramparts,

including a 12-pounder

which is still active and which is fired every day at noon – apparently a really loud bang.
After our visit, we walked along to the Public Gardens, a very pleasant environment.

Items of interest included a weeping beech tree

and a beautifully-coloured Blue Jay.

After the gardens, we passed the statue of Winston Churchill

were checked out by a starling

and then visited St. Mary’s Basilica,

a cathedral with a very handsome interior.

I was particularly struck by the stained glass half-dome above the altar. It being in the competitive nature of these things, the cathedral has, close by, the Anglican Church of St. David and

St. Matthew’s United Church.

Our rambling then took us in the general direction of the harbour, but en route we noticed that among all the modern high-rise constructions there are plenty of handsome old buildings in the city.

The downtown area has some interesting buildings, too;

and we were pleased to note that there is street art among the attempts to make the city look attractive.

We reached the harbour clock

which marks the start of a boardwalk stretching a couple of kilometres south, from the ferry terminal to the seaport. A lot of effort has gone into making this an attractive and pleasant area to walk, with artworks both mysterious and quirky along its length

(the tower structure is covered with plastic flaps, which flutter in the breeze – it’s rather lovely)

(the above street-light diptych is called “Get Drunk, Fall Down”)

as well as eating and drinking establishments. One of them, the BG (Halifax Beer Garden), was obviously paying its local tribute to Germany’s Oktoberfest, it being October first and that.

There is a life-size replica of the flagship of Ferdinand Magellan’s voyage of circumnavigation, 1519-1522 – the Trinidad

which in its day would have had 45 crew on board. I know people were smaller in those days, but I reckon it would still have been pretty cosy.

The rest of the walk down to the seaport passes many items of statuary – The Émigré, A tribute to Women in History, Samuel Cunard and three of the many examples of what might be figureheads that line the boardwalk here.

One significant statue is of Ruth Goldbloom, who fought for Pier 21 in the seaport to be restored and commemorated in recognition of the nearly one million immigrants who were processed through it between 1928 and 1971.

The plan was to get to Pier 22 which we thought might have some nice eateries and/or drinkeries. We were wrong. It turns out to be a tourist tat haven only open on cruise ship days intended, I imagine, to attract people who are boarding and who need to find just that one more special something for a special someone. Since there was a cruise ship in, only slightly larger than the substantial buildings of Pier 22,

it was open.

By this time, we were feeling somewhat sharp set, so we made our way back along the boardwalk with the idea of eating at a place that we’d seen earlier on, called Sea Smoke. There was a diversion en route in the form of a 1968 Routemaster London Bus,

used for hop-on-hop-off tours and, unsurprisingly, somewhat modified from the original,

because getting off the way we UK folk might consider would probably precipitate a traffic accident and lot of attendant paperwork. So an alternative exit is needed for the passengers

and an alternative entry for the driver.

As we ate our (very fine) meal at Sea Smoke, the cruise ship which had been at Pier 22 came by on its way out;

I’ve never seen so many radar aerials on a boat before.

We watched the ship do a graceful pirouette before exiting the harbour and then we ourselves exited the restaurant, which is distinguished by having many fire tables outside – very pleasant as the evening was chilly.

By this time, the light was fading (possibly matching your interest level in this post).

We passed a final, mystery piece of art

and then, as the evening light flared and then died,

we made our way back to the hotel.

Again, sorry for a long post with lots of photos, but I hope you found the read worthwhile. We had a really enjoyable day discovering the historical, arty and eat-y sides of Halifax, which comes across as being a very pleasant place to be.

Tomorrow has a planned excursion, if all goes well – a 10 mile hike. If we survive, I will be sure to document our progress here, but for now it’s time for bed. See you tomorrow!