A Summer Day In Portugal
This drawing seems to be my first that was made in a form of a visual diary. I didn’t make up a single detail here. Well, almost 🙂 .
Here you can see a small Portuguese town called Nazaré. My family and I spent a few summer days there. The following text is a description of the place and some events that took place there.
Nazaré turned out to be a lovely place. In summer there are a lot of tourists there, and a big part of them are Portuguese. A great Praia da Nazaré beach is very wide — there is plenty of room for everyone. It resembles the Copacabana beach of Rio de Janeiro. Plenty of people come here during the season. The sand is clean and comfortable for walking. On the beach there are severals rows of tents which are rented by tourists. One of the symbols of Nazaré (and Portugal in general) are fishermen’s boats painted with different colors. Nowadays some of these boats stand on the beach, and small copies of them are sold in souvenir shops all over the country. Other old Portuguese tradition is drying fish right by the ocean. Women dry the fish on special metal nets.
As for the military jet, they really did fly above the beach from time to time. I did a small research of Portuguese army aircrafts and chose to draw an F-16 military plane.
The landscape of the town is very interesting. One part of it is situated down near the ocean, and the other one is up on the high rocky hills. This two quarters are connected by a funicular. In the upper part there is a small chapel called Capela da Memória. It stands right near the precipice. On this site Portuguese king of the 12th century, Fuas Rupinho, nearly fell down from the cliffs. As a gratitude for miraculous rescue he ordered too build a chapel. By the way some of the houses where people live stand on these cliffs, right by the precipice, which impressed me a lot. Looking at them I couldn’t get rid of the feeling that the buildings can crumble down together with the cliffs. Right near the chapel there is a viewpoint with a marvelous view — the whole lower part of the town is seen from here.
Nazaré is famous among the surfers and attracts them from around the globe. On my drawing (on the top right), behind the cape with the lighthouse there is a beach called Praia do Norte. During storms extremely high waves appear on this site. Some world records on surfing the highest waves were set here. First an american Garrett McNamara surfed a 30-meter high wave here in January of 2013. Then in February of the same year Brazilian Carlos Burle set a new record, surfing a half-meter higher wave (30.5 meters). It happened on the 28th of October, when the windstorm ‘St. Jude’ was it its strongest phase in Europe. For us that is a memorable date — on that day we were on a train to Copenhagen, returning from the Kronborg castle. And the train stopped because of the trees fell on the railways.
At the time we were in Portugal Euro 2016 took place. The locals (and the tourists as well) gathered in bars and restaurants, all dressed in scarfs, hats and other fans’ accessories. The large screen was set on the embankment, the games were televised on it. Though the day we stayed at Nazaré the national team lost the match, we all know what was the outcome of the whole championship.
I only wrote about Nazaré, but besides that we visited several cities — Lisbon, Sintra, Porto and some other places. Portugal is a very beautiful and colorful country and I strongly wish to come back here again. Someday I’m gonna draw every place that I visit — that’s a plan of mine 🙂 .
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