SPT23008 - España y Portugal

Our first riding day took us from Madrid into the beautiful city of Salamanca. Along the way we paid a visit to the city of Escorial, with one of Spain's most famous building - the Palacio de El Escorial. This palace is the largest Barock building in the world. After our coffee break in this town, we continued over an elevated area called Navalperal de Pinares into Avila. Avila itself has a truly nice medieval city center with a beautiful cathedral.  After the extended lunch, we took the last 100 kms into Salamanca for an early arrival. Of course, we wanted to go and walk the city where Christopher Columbus has presented his plans to sail to India. As this tour has been especially designed for this group from Argentina, we tourguides decided to present you our daily riding stories in a different way. Please enjoy our daily pictures of this lively group of Argentinians :)

Let's start out for another fantastic riding day!! Today, we leave Salamanca in Spain and continue to the city of Chaves in Portugal. First, we criss-cross the plains of the Spanish Extremadura. Shortly before the city of Bragança we were crossing the border into Portugal. From the years 1640 to 1910 the House of Bragança was responsible for providing the Kings of Portugal and the two emperors of Brasil. The feudal castle of the Dukes still remains today and makes for an impressive view of the city. The road after Bragança makes it hard for us not to cheer in our helmets. It was truly "hard work" riding the about 100 kms of flowing curves into our tonights destination Chaves ;)

By by Chaves and our enjoyable evenening in the casino. Let's put it like this: no one got broke, but no one got rich either ;) But our intention is to ride motorcycles, so we continued our journey to arrive in Portugals most beautiful city, at least for me it is ;) Along the way, we were riding through the charming Portuguese National Park of Gerês. Bewitchingly beautiful nature as far as you can see and the tiniest, narrowest roads up and down and around the corner all the time !! What a great day !!

Porto was built in an hilly area and has a beautiful water inlet that actually has 2 ports. The history of that fact dates back to the 13th century. Back then the Bishop of Porto ruled the city and he charged taxes on all the goods that ships brought into Porto. King Alfonso, though, tried to get around this tax by building a second port in a new part of the city called Vila Nova de Gaia. Over time, this port became the most important transipment port for the grapes arriving from the vineyards at the River Douro. On our rest day today we sure will find out more about the famous port wine ;)