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Showing posts from April, 2025

Braga - Bom Jesus do Monte

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 ...