The Holidays Are Illuminated – Part 2

Getting in the holiday spirit

One of our favorite things to do during December in Portugal is to get out and look at the Christmas lights. There’s enough of a chill in the air to make it feel like winter, but it’s mild enough that we can spend several hours wandering from neighborhood to neighborhood.

During our first winter in Portugal, we did the Part 1 post with scenes from around Porto, Lisbon, and Cascais. This year we’ve gotten out to see more of Lisbon and we just did a quick road trip to sample the holiday illumination in several other towns.

Here’s a bit of what we’ve seen and a story with a surprising ending.

Lisbon

Our own neighborhood of Alvalade, in north central Lisbon, gets in the holiday spirit with lights above Avenida da Igreja. There’s even a Christmas market with stalls along both sides of the street.

A few blocks to the south, the Campo Pequeno center is lit in spectacular fashion. We wondered if it was bright enough to be seen from space.

In front of the Campo Pequeno complex, three angels stand watch in the middle of busy Avenida da República.

One evening we went to the Praça do Comércio, on the bank of the Tagus River, to look at the lights in the central part of Lisbon. We arrived at dusk, just in time to see the giant Christmas tree light up.

We walked north, through the Arco do Rua Augusta, then turned back to admire the lighted figures hovering above the street.

A few blocks north, in the older center of the city, an illuminated sign welcomed visitors to Praça Dom Pedro IV, aka Rossio Square. Boas festas is Portuguese for “Happy holidays”.

Inside the square, a Christmas market attracted hundreds of shoppers and browsers enjoying a clear December evening.

The Road Trip

We hadn’t done a road trip in quite a while, so getting out and seeing some of the country was a real treat.

And if you’re going to do a road trip, you need a good car. We had a great one: a Fiat 500 convertible. Small, nimble, fun to drive. And it’s name was “Dolcevita”, which we loosely translate to “Sweet life”.

Life was sweet on the road in this little gem.

Here is some of what we saw on our trip.

Coimbra

We started our holiday road trip with a stop in Coimbra, home to one of the oldest universities in the world. We enjoyed walking through the old part of the city, admiring the lights and doing some window shopping.

Nazaré

We planned our road trip around an invitation to a Christmas party at the home of our friends Beverly and Daniel in Nazaré. This is a beach town, known in the international surfing community for gigantic waves. The surf was calm on this day, but we still took time to visit the beach, where we found this fellow working on his winter tan.

Caldas da Rainha

We made a brief stop in Caldas da Rainha the next day and spent some time at the Parque Dom Carlos I. This is a beautiful park in the center of town. The decorations included a miniature village of houses for kids to play in and a Christmas tree in the middle of the lake.

Obidos and the surprise ending

Obidos is a small town in central Portugal. Within its boundaries is a well-preserved medieval castle and castle walls. It is a very popular tourist destination, especially at Christmas time – a fact we did not consider when we booked a hotel room within the castle walls.

We had visited it one afternoon in November and found it packed with people, some bussed in from cruise ships moored in Lisbon. But somehow we thought it would be cleared out the week before Christmas.

Boy, were we wrong!

As we approached the town, early in the afternoon, we got into a big traffic jam – dozens or hundreds of cars trying to get up a two lane road to park close to the walled city. Rather than sit in traffic, we turned around and spent most of the afternoon hiking around the Lagoa de Obidos – a large lake about 10 miles away.

By late afternoon we hoped the crowd might have thinned out, so we started toward Obidos again. This time we found a back way from the lake to one of the main parking areas.

Getting from the car to the hotel was like swimming upstream in a rushing river of people. I led the way, muscling through the crowd while dragging a suitcase. Mary and Sox followed in my wake. After a couple hundred meters, we found the side street that led to our hotel.

The town stayed crowded until well into the evening. Just after dark, we took a quick walk, but quickly went back to our room. This was not how we planned our stay.

But by around 10:00pm, the tourists had gone and we had the town almost to ourselves. It was an amazing experience to walk through the ancient streets, in the dark and the quiet.

We climbed to the top of the wall and marveled at the brightly lit front face of the castle.

Back down at street level, we walked across the old city, seeing no one except the occasional shop owner taking out the trash or locking up for the night.

With no crowds pushing and shoving around us, we could step back and appreciate the intricate decorations placed around the shop doors.

It made us realize that holiday magic doesn’t just happen in the movies.