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.
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.
