Skinny-Dipping in Lourdes

As with most of my time in Europe this last March and April, most of my time in Porto was unstructured.   I had spent nearly two months touring cathedrals in Spain, France, and Portugal - enough to last me a lifetime.  The sameness seemed repetitive, if familiar – given my Catholic upbringing.  But the similarity seemed less silly when I considered that, during the era when these were built, most people would likely see only one of them in their lifetime – if that.  So a modern tourist, who finds them only a short  flight, or TGV ride apart from each other, and tires after the third one in a week, is missing the point.   Still, I generally was looking for more idiosyncratic attractions, so in Porto I sampled Port wine, and walked up and down the many hills that define the city.   4/17/2025 When I was in Porto, Portugal a couple years ago, I took a day trip to Braga, about an hour north of Porto by train.  By then I had seen so many ...

Cordoba is an incredibly beautiful city, that The scale of time is different here.  For example, when our country was founded in 1776, the Mosque–Cathedral of Córdoba had been a Roman Catholic church for three hundred years.  But that Catholic church built within a mosque that had been operating for seven hundred years ... which had been built partly with parts scavenged from an early Visogothic church ... which was most likely built on something the Romans had there.  The layers of history are dramatic, and somehow quite visible.   I visited a museum nearby, dedicated to the memory of the Sephardim, the story of their persecution in Spain, and the diaspora that followed.   Monday, I visited the Museo Vivo al Andalus, which offers an overview of the practices and beliefs that existed in the time between the Umayyad conquest of Hispania in the early 700s to the completion of the Christian 'reconquista' in 1492.  This latter date relates to the Shep...