Tag Archives: Tourism

Day 8 Part 2 – Arriving in Tomar

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Friday 4 September 2026 – We arrived (exUberantly?) in Tomar shortly after midday at our very posh hotel.

It’s the Hotel dos Templarios. Yes, here we are in Tomar, Knights Templar GHQ. Just on entering the hotel, the Templar symbols abound.

So, before anything else, here’s a bit of background on the city of Tomar and the Knights Templar, a powerful medieval military religious order founded in 1118 to protect Christian pilgrims traveling to the Holy Land.

Tomar was founded in 1160 by Gualdim Pais, a crusader knight and Grand Master of the Knights Templar in Portugal, on land granted to the Order by King Afonso Henriques as a reward for their role in the Reconquista. Pais built the town’s castle and fortress on a hill above the Nabão river, designed to guard the frontier and the road to Lisbon against Moorish incursions.

After the Knights Templar were suppressed across Europe in the early 14th century (Pope Clement V dissolved the order in 1312, under pressure from Philip IV of France), Portugal’s King Dinis took a different path. Rather than persecute the Templars as other monarchs did, he negotiated with the papacy to have their assets and personnel transferred into a new Portuguese order, the Order of Christ, founded in 1319 with its headquarters at Tomar — effectively the Templars continuing under a new name and royal control.

The Order of Christ was extraordinarily wealthy, and in the 15th century that wealth (and the order’s crusading, seafaring ethos) fused directly with Portuguese exploration. Henry the Navigator served as governor of the Order of Christ, and its funds helped finance the voyages that opened up the African coast and beyond.

Quite a big deal for the history of the area, then.

Quite a big deal for the subsequent marketing folk to exploit, too, as witness the entrance to the hotel. However, not everything is to do with the Knights Templar, as we saw for ourselves after a quick chat with the hotel reception established that it would be a couple of hours before a room became available for us. The sun was (just) over the yardarm by this stage, but we didn’t fancy sitting in the bar (ooh, you have changed – Ed) and it was too early for lunch, so there was nothing for it but to go for a walk. Obviously.

On the drive over, with the sun behind the clouds and the car’s temperature gauge showing 28°C, I’d begun to worry that we were overreacting to the forecast hot weather; and when we walked out of the hotel, it was hot but not intolerable. Jane had (of course) found something for us to do to pass the time, which involved visiting a hermitage. Unfortunately, said hermitage was uphill from us.

See that little white spire at the top of the picture? Yup, that’s where we had to get to. It’s the Ermida de Nossa Senhora da Piedade, and it’s at the top of the Escadórios de Nossa Senhora da Piedade.

There are reportedly 292 steps up to the top, and I walked up it. Twice. (For reasons why, read on).

It’s an interestingly architected staircase, with several flights interspersed with landings, each of which has a circing wall around it.

As you climb, you get a great view across a valley to the city’s main tourist attraction religious institution, the Convent of Christ and the castle.

More on that in a subsequent post.

At the top is the Hermitage

originally built in the 14th century and restored in the 17th. Inside, it’s quite simple

with a barrel roof over the altar.

The staircase was built in 1846 and finished with trees planted either side ten years later. Jane took this shot down the stairs which gives a good view of how it works.

Jane also told me that she had seen what she thought might have been action camera footage of someone riding down the stair case on a bicycle, and suggested that I could try a hyperlapse. This sounded fun, and I had my Osmo stabilised camera with me, so I tried it.

It was rubbish.

For some reason the camera kept drifting off pointing straight down the stairs, making me wish I’d used hyperlapse on my phone. So, while she rested in the shade, I toiled my way back up, and did it using the phone. I’m not sure how edifying the results are, but I worked hard to get this footage so I’m going to show it anyway.

The heat was not intolerable, but it was quite hard work, and so we felt we’d earned outrselves a Nice Lunch back at the hotel. Lunch over, we checked in, collected our bags dumped everything in our room and went for (another) walk. Obviously.

By this stage, the heat was quite intense, so I felt better about not having walked over from Vila Nova da Barquinha. Our hotel is very handily placed for scenic and significant spots around the city. It borders some gardens and the river, which is the Nabão (we’ve moved away from the Tagus). The river is used to drive a waterwheel.

It’s not dramatic, but slowly turns away moving (I read) up to 750 hectolitres of water an hour.

As you can see, it’s not doing any real work. Its purpose is educational. According to info boards nearby, “Of the dozens of waterwheels that existed by the late 19th century, only the Mouchão waterwheel remains – built and maintained by the municipality – to preserve memories for future generations.” It’s built from oak and pine and is about 10m in diameter – a significant piece of machinery.

Crossing the bridge to get to the waterwheel takes one into the park, and we walked down to the old bridge that can be seen in the distance in the photo above.

We crossed the road, and I was slightly surprised to find a poster adveritising the imminent corrida back in Barquinha.

A reasonably big deal, then.

Jane wanted to visit a specific church in the town, the church of St. John the Baptist, so we walked towards it through the attractive streets

into the square in front of the church.

The statue is of Knights Templar Grand Master Gualdim Pais, and he faces the church.

which, as you can see, has a very elaborate Manueline portal.

Inside

there’s a feature which interested us – a Eucharistic Throne, one of those showy-offy bits of religious theatre indigenous to the Iberian peninsula of which the Papacy so disapproved that it was banned and only appears in a couple of places now.

The barrel ceiling over the throne is very decorative.

By this stage, the heat outside was getting really oppressive, so we headed back to the cool of the hotel for the rest of the day. Our hotel room gave us a good view of the castle, which is lit up rather attractively at night.

It just remained to get ourselves ready for another burst of relentless tourism on the morrow. I’ll regale you with tales of that in due course – stay tuned!

Day 8 Part 1 – Leaving Vila Nova da Barquinha

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Friday 4 September 2026 – Another day, another Uber. The forecast was unchanged – a very warm (30°C, cloudy and humid) day was in prospect. With a 23km walk, meaning at least 6 hours and probably seven on the road, and an elevation profile like this

helped us decide on taking a ride to our next destination, Tomar. Not therefore having to get out at sparrowfart allowed us to take time to look round Vila Nova da Barquinha in more detail, seeking out the bits of street art which were within walking distance and revisiting the sculpture trail in the park that we’d pottered around yesterday evening, to see things in decent light.

Barquinha (for such I’ll call it in the interests of brevity) is typical of our experience of Portugal so far – touches of great elegance against a backdrop of neglect. So, for example, some wonderful azulejos

but a badly-maintained backdrop.

One thing that looked in good nick was the bullring.

We saw from a poster by the railway station that a corrida was happening in a week’s time; whether this clean and tidy appearance was due to the imminent event or whether civic pride generally kept it looking nice we will never know. However, I happened to notice that one of the doors, the second one, labelled “Camarotes”

was open. So we looked in. It would appear that “Camarotes” means “Boxes” in the sense of privileged viewing places.

and we got a good view of the arena, which was being worked on, presumably, again, for the forthcoming festivities.

I had formed the impression (see the featured image for why) that the “Vila Nova” (“new town”) part of Barquinha’s name meant that it was only about a century old. Wrongly, as it turns out. It has a significant history stretching back centuries. Actually, the development of the region is strongly related to the Reconquista period, when the nearby river Tagus was the border between the dominions of Christians and Moors. In the 12th century, the defence of this border was in charge of the Knights Templar, who built several castles along the river. One of these is the Castle of Almourol, (which we didn’t get round to visiting for various reasons). At the end of the 13th century, when the Reconquista was finished, the importance of the castles of the region declined and the villages along the Tagus then became important riverside ports for the transport of agricultural goods of the region to Lisbon. There’s an azulejo in the riverside park about this.

Vila Nova da Barquinha was created in the 17th century around a fluvial port. In the 18th and 19th centuries the village became the most important in the region, and it was turned into the seat of the municipality in 1836. The history of the place explains the touches of elegance we saw as we walked around.

And it was quite a walk to the first street art installation,

tiling placed round what we think is (or was once) an electricity substation. The tiling was done by Manel Vieira in 2018, and it doesn’t look as if the building has had much TLC ever since, which is a shame. We pressed on, going back past the bullring and a tiled installation

which is apparently about 500 years of the Reformation in Europe. A tiling panel next to it dated it as 2017, but I couldn’t decipher the artist’s name.

We walked some way out of the centre of Barquinha and passed a mural that I’d actually noted on our ride into the town;

another piece that would have been impressive at the time but which looks very sad now. The same was true of the next instance we came to;

a further example of an attempt to prettify infrastructure which has been allowed to decay. The final piece on this part of the walkabout was an impressive work, once again using infrastructure as the canvas.

In it, the artist (whose name was not specified in the accompanying panel) expresses his concern about pollution in the Tagus River. (There was one more example of prettified infrastructure, which I’ll come to later.)

As we walked about, we noted that the mosaic pavements were decorated in a very specific pattern,

which Jane correctly identified as a small boat, which is, of course, how “Barquinha” translates into English. This was confirmed at the municipality offices.

The mosaic pavements stretched across much of our walk. We came across a couple of guys working on the maintenance of a section,

which makes one realise what a huge scope of work all of these pavements are.

Not everywhere is tatty. The sports pavilion is tidy and announces itself with great panache.

and many of the houses and apartments are in good shape.

We were struck by all the white space around

that was completely devoid of graffiti. Until we got to the station, that is.

I wonder whether there’s a specific anti-graffiti task force which keeps (almost) everything clean; it certainly makes a change from everywhere else we’ve been, where graffiti is depressingly ubiquitous.

On returning from the above peregrination, we walked around the park, where there is that other example I mentioned earlier, of an electricity substation that has been gussied up.

and we walked past the various sculptures beside the paths in the park.

“Rotter” – a representation of a wicker basket used in fishing in the Algarve
“House in the Sky” – industrial storage boxes used to build a prefab
“Line of Earth and River” – in polished and brushed stainless steel
Untitled – actually four tall steel mirrors, turning the garden into a stage
“Contramundo” – artistic tosh in the description of this trilobite
“Square house with tree inside”. Nuff said
“Castle” was once in yellow granite
“Concrete Poem”
“Irrigation”
“Over the forest” inspired by a mandala

As well as all the above slightly pretentious stuff, there were a couple of rotating disks, one of which gave a very compelling illusion.

 

The park was opened in 2005 and the sculpture trail inaugurated in 2012. The building decorations seem to date from around 2017 or 2018, so it’s clear that sporadic efforts have been made to bring art into the public spaces. It’s just a shame that, having done this good work, so much of it has been left to decay.

The café in the park got some more of our business after all that walking, and then we whistled up an Uber to take us on to Tomar, where we have a rest day. (Well, I suppose you could call today and the preceding couple of days “rest days” since we didn’t actually walk any of the Caminho. But we have walked a bit – today’s wandering round Barquinha was a 7km path, so we haven’t been entirely idle.) Tomar has significant historical and cultural significance and so I’ll deal with it in subsequent entries.

 

Day 7 – Azinhaga and Vila Nova da Barquinha

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Thursday 3 September 2026 – A very quick update, as not much happened. That’s not to say the day was not without event, but we didn’t do any walking. Had we done so, we would have needed to cover 16.6km, which would probably have taken us five hours. According to Accuweather, even if we’d started out at 7am, we’d have been pretty uncomfortable by the end.

So I investigated what Uber could do for us. Bearing in mind that we were a long way from anywhere of any pith or moment, I was a little surprised to find that a car could be with us within a quarter of an hour. After a very basic breakfast – toast and tea, basically – we lazed most of the morning away and added a pin to Helena’s map to show where we were from. Assuming that she hasn’t spent many nights stabbing random pins into her large map of the world, Helena has hosted a huge number of visitors from every corner of the globe (except, of course, Antarctica, since no-one actually lives there). We took our leave of the delightful Helena at 11am.

We waited outside her house

for a couple of minutes for our Uber ride to turn up, and then Campos took us swiftly, and with equal disdain for both speed limits and small talk, along the road to Vila Nova da Barquinha. When we got into his car at 11am, the temperature was 30°C and when we got out some twenty minutes later it had risen to 32°C. Some of the road he drove was also the Caminho route and it became clear how unrewarding a walk it would have been.

We actually passed some peregrinos;

my hat is off to them for their courage, if not their judgement.

Having arrived in Vila Nova da Barquinha, we had about 90 minutes to pass before we knew, courtesy of a message exchange with our next accommodation, that someone would be on reception to check us in. Fortunately, just by the hotel is a park

and in that park there is a café,

so we could rest in the shade and stay hydrated. Actually by 1pm, the temperature had become uncomfortable even for just sitting still in the shade and so we hied ourselves across the road to the River House Hotel. It was locked, but there appeared to be someone visible inside through the window, and after we peered in theatrically for a few minutes there was a click and the entrance was unlocked, allowing us through into a blissfully cool reception area, where a lady peregrino was checking in, having very clearly done a fair bit of walking in the heat. Then it was our turn ad we were efficiently checked in, stamped, and handed the keys to our room.

The hotel is small and modern, and, as is so often the case with this combination, the rooms are well-organised. And, importantly, air-conditioned. We knew about one restaurant in the village, Tasquinha Adélia, and Google told us it was open until 2.30, so we hightailed it over there in the hope that they could fit us in for lunch. At first, it wasn’t certain, as the place was very busy

and the staff seemed to have their hands more than full. But they methodically worked at placing some ladies who had arrived just before us (because we vacillated; our fault) and a family who arrived after us, presumably having booked, and then we had our table. Like Peitaças yesterday evening, the menu was basic and the food was good, honest and copious. The place itself though, as you can see from the photo, is very eclectically decorated, and it had a nice buzz of conversation going.

By about 3.30, we’d finished our food and so headed back to the hotel, stepping out into really stinging hot temperatures. We had hoped to buy some milk at somewhere Google described as a grocery, but that was another of Google’s fantasy moments – it was (a) a clothes shop and (b) closed. The route from it back to the hotel led past an intriguing building

and we wondered what kind of museum it was, apart from a sealed closed one, of course. Apparently it has a variety of unusual exhibits, but it’s labelled as “temporarily closed” so we’ll never find out. Given its name, one might expect it rather to be permanently sealed.

Vila Nova da Barquinha has a couple of things worth looking at – a sculpture park and some street art. We went for a stroll down by the river

and saw some of the sculptures, but it was dusk by that stage. We’ll potter around tomorrow before we depart for Tomar and take some photos in good light. One engaging item we found comprised a couple of rotating disks, and one of them carries a compelling illusion.

So: plans for tomorrow, then. The coming weather prospect is not encouraging for long distance walking.

The Caminho route to Tomar is 23km, and involves some uphill work; to walk six or seven hours in what are expected to be hot and humid conditions seems to us to be a poor choice; so we will take a ride again tomorrow. Tomar, though, has an interesting history and one or two particularly significant buildings to explore. A rest day is on our schedule, and so I hope there will be plenty to entertain you from our time there.