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All images were taken by and are copyright ©
Kate Withey
&
Eric A. Hulteen
2007.
Edited on Wednesday 21 March 2012.
Kate and Eric in the streets of Lisbon at night. The light really was that yellow.
And we thought that the cars in Paris were small. Portugal has some pretty small trucks.
Kate in the lobby of the Gulbenkian Museum posing as a piece of art.
The view from our host Katharine's house with Lisbon's version of the Golden Gate Bridge (the
25 de Abril Bridge) in the background. That's Katharine on the left having dinner with us and with her daughter Miriam who plays the cello.
The
Vasco da Gama Bridge
is a cable-stayed bridge that spans the harbor at Lisbon. It is the longest bridge in Europe, with a total length (including approaching viaducts) of 17.2 kilometers (10.7 miles).
I have seen it asserted that the bridge spans the Tagus River, but the river is nowhere wider than one kilometer (over its 1,038 kilometer length) until it reaches what I would call Lisbon harbor where the width expands to 13 kilometers before merging with the Atlantic Ocean. If you were to apply the same logic you would have to assert that the Golden Gate Bridge spans the Sacramento River in California (rather than San Francisco Bay).
We visited the
Alqueva Dam
in the Alentejo area of Portugal — about 34 miles southeast of Evora. It's claimed that the reservoir behind the dam is Western Europe's largest, but it's not explicit whether the measure is of surface area or volume.
We visited this and the Aldeadávila dam because of Eric's interest in water.
We visited the castle at Mourão. The reservoir in the background is the one created by the dam at Alqueva.
A sign at the site says:
"The megalithic enclosure of Almendres, one of the first public monuments in the human history, comprises the largest group of menhirs to have been erected on the Iberia Peninsula, and one of the most important in Europe."
"This megalithic monument originally consisted of more than a hundred monoliths. The excavation have made possible the detection of various phases of construction throughout the Neolithic period (the 5th to the 4th millennia BC) to the point where it acquired an appearance similar to that which is found today."
"There are 92 menhirs, with different shapes and dimensions, some small, rudely shaped blocks, others of greater size which have given the place the name of Alto das Pedras Talhas. They form two enclosures erected in different, distinct epoch, geminated, and aligned to accord with the equinoxes. Then of the monoliths are decorated, exhibiting rellets or engravings."
Salamanca
is a beautiful city that we did not adequately capture in pictures.
Aldeadávila Dam is a gravity-arch dam on the Duero River which, in the vicinity of the dam, forms the border between Spain and Portugal. The dam is 56 miles west northwest of Salamanca, Spain.
The hydroelectric plant at the dam is of the pumped-storage type — in addition to generating electricity in the conventional way, water can be pumped from the bottom of the dam back up into the reservoir when electricity is cheap (during periods of low demand) so that it can be run back down through the generators again when electricity is expensive (during periods of peak demand).
