Friday 11th March 2011

Caught the bus into Lagos, which is only three to four kilometres away. We got off by the harbour which is quite large and walked around past the marina towards the beach. The marina has mostly sailing yachts in it including a number of charter ones and some very fast looking sponsored catamarans. We walked out to the beach which looked great, 4 k of fine sand, surrounding a huge bay. The bay and harbour have made Lagos an important port and town since it began and it was the regional capital from the 15^th to 17^th century. Like most of Portugal it suffered serious damage in an earthquake in 1755 and so most of the buildings date from after this time.

Due to the weather, cold and windy, we took shelter in a lovely beach restaurant where we ordered hot drinks, this time I played safe with a coffee (and a brandy, its warming!), Sarah stuck with the hot chocolate. The drinks were fine, my brandy was very nice and very large! With the weather looking worse we decided to stay and have lunch there, the food looked great and reasonably priced. We weren’t disappointed, lunch was very good and by the time we had finished the sun had come out.

We spent the afternoon exploring the old part of the town, which is quite quaint with lots of small cobbled streets and lots of restaurants including a Romanian one called “Count Dracula”! Imagine ordering the blood sausage there!

The Portuguese established important trade routes with West Africa and Lagos was the site of the first slave market in Europe. On the 7^th August 1544 several Portuguese ships docked and unloaded 230 African slaves (men, women & children), from then on they received a regular supply. The town has a small museum in the old slave house, where the slaves were sold. They described the events of that day and other facts about the slave trade, including the area just outside the town where over 150 skeletons have been found all of African origin; some of whom were buried (Free slaves possibly) the rest just discarded and left. A sobering thought, especially when you consider 500 years later we still have humans (this time just women) being sold as slaves across Europe.

To finish on a brighter note, we liked Lagos and its old town, as well as the fantastic beach and beachside bar/restaurants which in summer must be really great.