Day 6 - Beach adventure

After visiting the Cathedral, David and I decided to try to visit the beach.  I had read reviews of several different beaches in the area which ranged from "party beach to rocky beach to sandy-and-sheltered-for-swimming beach". None of them were particularly close.  Although we had had some very hot sunny days, today was not sunny and only moderately hot.  We decided to try "swimming beach" but didn't bring our suits.  Our plan was just to walk in the surf and enjoy the ocean. 

We took the metro to a commuter rail station and waited for our train.  I wondered if some of these logs were from the downed trees from the winter storms that lashed the country this year.

I was really glad that I bought round trip tickets, because this is the platform that we ended up at.  No station at all, not even an automated ticket machine.  A return train comes through every hour, so we needed to keep an eye on the clock depending on when we wanted to be home.

It was a tiny town.  We grabbed lunch at this beach front cafe.  It was overcast, but not chilly at all. 

It was a good swimming beach and 10-15 kids were splashing in and out of the water. 

We decided to walk along the sea wall first and then wade into the water. 

There were so many small mussels bunched on the rocks.

This fisherman was down with his knife scraping the mussels off the rocks and into a back.  David thought he might be using them for bait. They were too small to be harvesting to eat. 

The sand was a little too gravelly to walk barefoot, so we decided to sit on the rocks and just soak our feet.

When we took the train back into Porto, we got off a few stops early and walked across the Dom Luis bridge.

This is part of the Fernandine Walls that once surrounded the city.  They date back to the 1360s and were mostly removed in the 1700s as the city expanded. 

We've noticed a lot of vacant and run down buildings around the city, even in what appear to be very attractive locations - riverside views, so I looked it up.  There are an estimated tens of thousands of empty buildings.  Problems include: Much of Porto’s center is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Local architectural rules require owners to preserve historic facades and specific structural elements. Meeting modern seismic and safety codes within these old wooden and stone frameworks makes renovation prohibitively expensive for the average citizen. Properties are often passed down to multiple heirs rather than a single owner. If family members disagree on whether to sell, renovate, or divide the property, the building frequently gets caught in a judicial deadlock and sits vacant for years. Dating back to the Salazar dictatorship, many properties were locked into old rent control contracts. Landlords made little to no profit and couldn't afford building upkeep, causing a widespread physical decline of the city's buildings. Some corporate entities or private investors buy up decaying property portfolios, leaving them empty.  To combat this, the Portuguese government and municipalities in the region have implemented measures such as tripling property taxes on unused buildings to pressure owners into selling or renting them.