Day 37 - Body parts going cheap

We left the man part of Aveiro and drove 14km to the the nearby Atlantic beach are of Costa Nova. The beach was lovely with soft sand but hidden from the town by sand dunes. Many of the houses in the area were decorated with stripes with bright colours and the fences were decorated with huge bows, some made by different coloured plastic bags.

Next stop was Coimbra, the original capital city of Portugal. The buildings and old town area had a lovely sense of antiquity. We walked up to to the university at the top of the hill with its grand old buildings overlooking the city.

Next stop after lunch stop was the town of Fatima, an important place for Catholic pilgrims because of their belief that the Virgin Mary appeared there in 1917. As it was later in the afternoon the sanctuary wasn't that busy and it didn't have the atmosphere of Lourdes but the huge size made up for it. The viewing area is so large that they have had 1.5 million pilgrims there at one time. The Chapel of the Apparitions attracts the very devout and there was a woman circling the outside perimeter on her knees as well as another elderly lady approaching the altar, also on her knees. It was possible to buy candles to burn as offerings, as well as wax models of body parts to help the devout with their prayers.

Our final destination was Nazare, the site of the world's largest waves, with the highest ever surfed at Nazare at 23.8m. The waves are so large because of the underground Nazare Canyon. We walked to the light house for a view of the beach, and from where we were standing up high we could see they they weren't at their biggest, just "regular" size waves today. Dinner was a lovely meal of freshly grilled fish at a nice restaurant opposite the town beach, a pleasant way to finish the day.