Henry the Navigator

It's my last day on a coast, so it's time to deal with Henry the Navigator.  

He is celebrated all over coastal Portugal with statues and squares and plaques exalting his role in Portugal's successes in trade and exploration.  He's recognized in Porto with that very large seaward-pointing statue in a square named for him.   It's said he was born in Porto to Dom Joao I and Philippa of Lancaster on March 4, 1394 at the Customs House, now called Casa Do Infante (Henry is the Infante) in his honor.

The legends surrounding Henry are plentiful and the exhibit at the Casa do Infante didn't really clear up much for me.  In fact, it starts out with different paintings in which they acknowledge that no one agrees on what he looked like.  He did adopt the personal motto "talent de bien faire" which means a "talent for doing well," but the nickname "the navigator" was given to him by historians long after he died.

This much I'm convinced is commonly accepted:  Henry was determined to promote mapping and exploration and trade and used his considerable resources to sponsor people doing those things, the result of which made Portugal a world power in colonization, trade and cartography, with impacts felt in Spain, South America, Africa and India.  When I was in Sagres, there was much made of the "navigation school" Henry was said to have founded there... except some people say that's just not true.  The exhibit here did acknowledge the terrible consequence of Portugal's involvement in enslaving Africans and colonizing other parts of the world.

The Casa do Infante is actually the site of Roman ruins from the 4th & 5th centuries, on top of which a customs house was built in the 14th century and functioned as such for 500 years.

The excavations on the site show you the bases of the original 1700 year old walls and the more recent 800 year old walls.  Although mosaics from the Roman times were found in the excavations, they've been replaced by recreations of the patterns in their places.  Exhibits you reach by climbing metal staircases erected inside the building hold pieces of pottery and coins found on the site.

There's an interesting history of the functions of a Customs House, use of abaci (another very frequent Spelling Bee word) and the use of the site as a mint for coin-making from metals as a necessary function for trade and taxation.  

And now, on a practical note:  I'd embarked on this trip with the idea that I'd bring few clothes and just wash them or wear them however/whatever condition they were in.  It wasn't much of a hardship the first 5 weeks while I was in the hot, sunny Algarve with a washing machine and drying racks.  These past two weeks a hotel in Lisbon and in a washer-less apartment in Porto have been tough, clothes-wise. So this morning I went to what I'm sure is the #1 best laundromat in the world-- Miele washers and dryers operated by a central computer terminal, clean laundry baskets for transferring your clothes from the washer to the dryer and, yes, dryers.  Aaah.  My last days here will be greatly improved for that.

I also tried to get outside to paint between rain showers and did not get too far before the rain started again (the red is the priming under what will be the eventual painting).

I also went back into some earlier paintings, inside the apartment, to resolve them a bit more.  Still more to do on the street scene from last month.

And now I'm packing up again.   

I'd mentioned previously that I can't reply to comments (this, SIM card swaps and two-factor authentication have been really hard to address), so one thing that I've been asked has been about how much English is spoken here and on tours.  My experience has been that -- with the exception of fishermen in the smaller villages -- English is spoken everywhere.  The two times I've had a guide (Devour tours and the Palacio da Bolsa) the tour was in English.  Restaurants, no problem there either.  I have found that what I read in Portuguese doesn't sound anything like what I thought it would be, so I've used handwritten notes with addresses for cab drivers.  I just spent 20 minutes on the phone with the taxi I am hoping will pick me up at my apartment tomorrow with my heavy suitcases because no matter how I tried to say the address or spell the address, the dispatcher couldn't understand me and I couldn't understand her.   We finally were able to agree on nearby landmarks which led to what I hope will be a success at getting a cab.

I have listened to the radio on Portuguese stations and hours of listening have made no difference whatsoever in my ability to pick out anything other than band names in English.  I do say "bom dia" and "obrigado" but other than that, English works well enough.