Day 10 - Monday, October 28, 2024 - Amarante

We are on our way back down the river. All this morning we are cruising from Pinhao to Peso da Regua where we will dock after lunch and then take a bus to Amarante. The ship will continue on to Porto Antigo where we will meet it later in the afternoon.

We went through the deepest lock at 115'. It is pretty impressive that it only takes a few minutes for the ship to drop that distance.

Travel is always full of adventures. We wanted to make a train reservation for Porto to Lisbon and discovered the trains are on strike for a week. Then I tried FlixBus which was recommended but the web site wasn't working to take my payment. Then we finally got tickets on another bus line. The bus only takes 3 hours and 15 minutes compared with 2 hours and 45 minutes for the high-speed train.

After lunch we took a one hour bus ride to the city of Amarante in the mountains north of the river. This city is famous for the priest Goncalo who came here in the 1200s and believed that if a bridge was built over the Targas River, it could become very prosperous. He encouraged the building of the bridge and his dream came true with the town growing quickly as a main crossing point. He was sainted in part because he convinced the town people to build the bridge with out paying them but mostly because the workers became hungry and didn't want to work without food. He prayed and fish jumped out of the river and wine came out of the rocks. The fish heads and bones were thrown back into the river and turned into new fish. These miracles led the pope to have him sainted.

The main church in Amarante was constructed from the 1500s to the 1700s over his grave. It took 4 Portuguese kings to pay for the long construction and one can see changes in the architectural style over the 200 years that it took.

We walked up a small street to a small church to Saint Peter where a very friendly Portuguese man in broken English wanted to explain every detail of the church for us. We were concerned we wouldn't be able to get away to meet our bus on time. He enjoyed singing and treated us to snippets of contemporary rock music!

Then another hour ride back to the ship. We are having our big gala dinner tonight as many people will want to turn in early tomorrow night before exceptionally early departures at 3am! 



 
Leaving Douro River gorge just before lock

At top of lock waiting to go down



Exiting lock at bottom


Saint Goncalo Church in Amarante





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