Wednesday 30th April 2025.
It began to rain heavily this morning and continued to do so until mid afternoon , the first rain we have had for weeks, plus the temperature dropped to 11 degrees after the previous few days of being in the high 20’s.
Where we stopped last night, Tomar was quite a way inland and so today via the autoroute and toll motorway we have travelled 97 miles NW to the coast below Porto.
We stopped initially in Aveiro which is a city on the west coast of Portugal set alongside a lagoon called Ria de Aveiro,it has canals running through the city navigated by colourful boats (barcos moliceiros) traditionally they were used to harvest sea weed but now are a tourist attraction providing rides around the canals.
Virtually all footpaths and some streets are paved with small black and white cobbles which they use to make patterns.
We weren’t staying in Aveiro and so drove on a further few miles to Costa Nova where we are staying tonight by sand dunes that are separating us from the Atlantic waves.
There is a tradition in Costa Nova of painting the exterior of your house in vertical stripes, sounds weird but looks good.
A few hundred metres from us is Igreja Matriz da Costa we thought it was a lighthouse from the distance but it turned out to be a beautiful but in some ways simple church.
It has beautiful and modern stained glass windows that create a wonderful effect and there is tiled artwork around the alter, tabernacle and baptismal font.
It is now early evening and the sun is shining warmly and as we are the west coast we should get a good sunset.
taraabit 