LISBON: Day 14

On our second day we decided to travel out to the suburb of Belen. Belen has a number of claims to fame, one being it is the home of the Belen custard tart, available all over the country. The first call we made was to the Coach Museum which was established by the Queen of Portugal in 1905 when she saw that the rise of the car would obliterate horse-drawn carriages as a form of transportation. She placed the new museum in the palace's riding school. The result is a collection of more than 70 dazzling carriages lining the elegant old riding room.

One of the amazing old coaches

The spectacle coach

There is a special section on the assassination of the King of Portugal which includes photographs of the significant event plus the actual coach that the King was riding in at the time, including the bullet holes that you can see in the photographs. These can just be seen towards the top of the door.

The assassination coach

The Monastery of Jeronimos



Detail of the roof in the church

One of the stained glass windows in the church

The tomb of Vasco da Gama
In the Cloisters

Our third port of call was the Gulbenkian Museum which was in the northern past of Lisbon. This is reckoned to be the best of Lisbon's 40 museums. Calouste Gulbenkian was an Armenian oil tycoon who gave his art collection to Portugal as an act of gratitude to the country for the hospitality granted to him during WW II. He lived in Lisbon from 1942 until his death in 1955. The collection spans 5,000 years and is housed in a classy modern building and is educational and just plain beautiful. The museum is cool, gorgeously lit, uncrowded and easy to grasp displaying only a few select and exquisite works of art from each epoch. The museum is divided into sections; Egypt, Greece and Rome, the Islamic World, the Far East, Medieval Europe, Renaissance and Baroque painting, Louis XIV, XV, XVI, European Paintings, and a collection of Lalique jewellery. It was as good as the guide books said it would be.








Our time was running out and we made our way back to the Bus Station. We left at 1830 but it took about an hour to clear Lisbon which appears to have a severe traffic problem.