Ahh a man that has tasted Portugal..and forever was marked...Estoril is my home town..its where I live, 5 minutes from my marina, which is Cascais.
Dewey..Portugal now is much much different from what it was was in the 80's Those times were not so good as we had the revolution in 74 and in the 80's we were still trying to recover form the 8 Colonial wars we had in Africa (at the same time) and Timor, since the 60's (at same time you guys had Vietnam), we were still recovering from 50 years of Fascist Government by Salazar, that isolated us from the rest of the World, lost all the colonies, and suffered an Emigration fiasco due to the above, with people, specially low class people and upper mid class higher education people leaving the Couintry, mainly to France and to the USA, leaving the couintry without executioners and tech people.
Anyway, we joined the European Union in 84 and received a lot Euro funds and financial support and help to help us raise to European standards..not quite there yet, but almost....we now are on the Euro, and have become a Services and Tourism country with extremely good and well recognized Internationally Engineering and hiogher Education means.
Portugal has become a well respected tech supplier (which is good and for a change we are not known for our excellent soccer teams
PAY TAXES YOU GANGSTERS), and has increasingly showing up Internationally...( well a lot due to my excellent beautifull and fast boat
)...
Portugal hosted the 98 World Expo, the 2004 Euro Soccer Cup, missed being the PLACE WHERE THE America's Cup was supposed to be, due to last minute King Carlos of Spain reaching in his pocket and "throw" 12 or 15 Million US, to the ACC's organization, that went after the money to Barcelona, instead of after the Wind to Cascais, my port, Portugal will instead, host the ISAF World Cup in Cascais...well the real saiolrs are in the ISAF, the rich ones in the ACC...
I too love sardinhas (sardines) and we call (Prosciutto) Presunto, which means "big leg" and was started in Portugal and Spain together with the sausage or Choriço, when theMours, that invaded us in the year 700 did not eat pork meat...then went to Italy....anyway
We still have the best wine in the world, unfortunately little known as all our wine production is for internal consumption only, making it almost impossiblt ot get a bottle outside Portugal (other than Port and Mateus)... A Portuguese will never drink Mateus...its bad...
Anyway
here is Estoril and
here also
site
and if you are interested in seeing photos of Estoril and Cascais go to google and type:
ESTORIL or CASCAIS. or even MARINA CASCAIS...
Thanks for not bashing Portugal...the home of Giulietta