Monday 16th January 2017

It was very cold in the night at Ponte de Sor. We woke to find frost on the outside of the windows of the van and a temperature of 0 degrees inside. After warming everything up we set off north and before too long crossed the river Tejo which flows into the Atlantic at Lisbon.

We made quite a long journey today much of it through steep heavily forested hills.

We stopped to visit the roman ruins at Conimbriga south of Coimbra. 

These ruins of a roman city are very extensive with vast amounts of beautifully preserved mosaic floors.

In the late roman imperial period the city came under threat and this enormous defensive wall was built encircling half of the city and abandoning the other half to its fate.

 

Here are the remains of a gateway in the defensive wall.

Another gateway.

The remains of an aristocrat's mansion.

The heating system for the aristocrat's private bathing facilities.

Some more beautifully preserved mosaic floor. This site is absolutely huge and so far only 17% of it has been excavated.

By the time we'd visited most of the site we were both suffering from bad "museum back" so we moved on to the aire at the nearby town of Codeixa a Nova and stopped for the night. To day we left Alentejo region and moved across into Beira Litoral. We found a local shop which sold everything apart from bread which was what we were looking for but we did come out with a nice bottle of Porto.

Today we traveled 98 miles (158 kilometres). We are at N40.11322 W8.49512