Below the picture-postcard Lisbon is another Lisbon. A Lisbon without trams, decorative tiles or salted cod, from where the cobbled streets and red roofs wrapped around the city’s seven hills cannot be glimpsed, a little-known underworld where only adventurous souls enter and only after donning hard hats. Their reward is a chance to rekindle their […]

 Rainy season, Brazilian Amazon. Canoeing through a flooded rainforest brings the traveller up close and personal with monkeys, sloths and other creatures that usually spy unseen from their remote green watchtowers. And the swifter travel through swathes of forest barely accessible on foot makes the jungle feel endless. Yet WWF estimates that over a […]

Originally posted on Nomad Scribe:
John of Gaunt, the Duke of Lancaster, dining with King João I of Portugal Ever since my arrival in Lisbon, whenever new Portuguese acquaintances discover that I am English they invariably refer to the world’s oldest alliance or to Catherine of Braganza’s role in popularising tea-drinking in England. Their enthusiasm…

We face multiple threats on our streets, but on International Mine Awareness Day it is worth reflecting on one of humanity’s cruelest and most enduring weapons. First used on a wide scale in World War II, landmines still kill or maim over 4000 people per year. I witnessed their threat on a visit to an […]

 Chapel of Bones, Évora, Portugal – “We bones that are here, for yours await”. Await they did and their patience was rewarded as 5000 skeletal companions arrived. In the early 1500s, Franciscan monks relocated the bones from Évora’s overcrowded cemeteries to the chapel and slotted them into every crevice of every wall and pillar […]

 Winter in Madrid viewed from my office at the British Consulate-General. Madrid has extreme seasonal variations in temperature, with a record high of 40.6 °C and a record low of -10 °C, and is flanked by mountains, but snow rarely settles in the city centre. Indeed, this was the heaviest snowfall that many Spanish […]

Perito Moreno Glacier, Argentinian Patagonia. It is refreshing to discover a glacier not in retreat, and the consequences can be spectacular. Today, the Perito Moreno Glacier still advances to form a natural ice dam across the adjoining lake, before finally rupturing under the water pressure, with its 220-foot-high wall of ice crashing down into the […]

 Huambo, Angola. Eight years had passed since the end of Angola’s 27-year civil war, yet the scars were still apparent. Structures can be rebuilt but not the 500,000 lives lost in the war. Sadly, the world is little safer today. According to the Global Peace Index, only ten countries are totally free from conflict […]

500 years ago a German monk nailed 95 theses to a church door with a moral force that cracked open the edifice of the Catholic Church to reveal a rotten interior. By disputing the power of indulgences (by which the Pope granted remission of the temporal punishment of sin in purgatory through the sale of certificates) Martin […]

My final cultural outing in Lisbon was to the Museu Nacional de Arte Antiga (National Museum of Ancient Art), a treasure trove packed with Portuguese and European art produced between the 12th and 19th centuries. Among the various masterpieces discussed on the day with my Portuguese conversation group, for me two stood out for the […]