Beyondia

🌐 Around the World with Beyondia 🧵 Nordic & Western Europe Region 🪡 Episode 57: Porto In the second century AD, the Romans called it Portus Cale — the twin port complex at the mouth of the Douro river, with Portus on the northern bank and Cale on the southern bank. Over the following seven

🌐 Around the World with Beyondia 🧵 Nordic & Western Europe Region 🪡 Episode 56: Coimbra Every evening at closing time, the librarians of the Biblioteca Joanina spread leather sheets across the reading tables to protect them, and open the small ventilation apertures under the roof. Small bats fly in from the surrounding gardens and

🌐 Around the World with Beyondia 🧵 Nordic & Western Europe Region 🪡 Episode 55: Lisbon On the morning of All Saints’ Day, 1 November 1755, at approximately 9:40 in the morning, an earthquake of estimated magnitude 8.5 to 9.0 struck 200 kilometres off the coast of Lisbon in the Atlantic Ocean. The initial shaking

🌐 Around the World with Beyondia 🧵 Nordic & Western Europe Region 🪡 Episode 54: Évora Inside the Igreja de São Francisco in Évora, three Franciscan friars in the early 1600s built a small chapel eighteen metres long by eleven metres wide. They decorated its walls, columns, and ceiling with the exhumed skeletons of approximately

🌐 Around the World with Beyondia 🧵 Nordic & Western Europe Region 🪡 Episode 53: Lagos Between 1418 and 1460, a small Portuguese port on the southern Algarve coast served as the operational base for a systematic project of Atlantic exploration that produced, across four decades, the first coherent European maps of the African coast,

🌐 Around the World with Beyondia 🧵 Nordic & Western Europe Region 🪡 Episode 52: Madeira Every serious wine on Earth is protected from heat. Winemakers build cellars underground to keep temperatures stable at twelve degrees. Heat destroys aromatics, oxidises colour, degrades acidity. Everyone knows this. Except on one Portuguese island in the mid-Atlantic, where