You find me in a dilemma. In recent months, I have, I hope, served well those of my readers who are happy to follow me along any whimsical byway. However, those who demand that I give at least a passing nod to my ostensible subject – Portugal (as is more than suggested by the blog’s witty title of Penamacorrespondent) – are, by this stage, probably feeling cheated. What am I to do?

My fund of anecdotes about personal encounters with Portugal is exhausted; until Bernice and I manage to get there again, I have only two choices. I can make stuff up (tempting, but rather risky, having already learnt the hard way what an erudite lot you are), or I can Google. So, this week’s post comes to you freshly but shamelessly milked from the internet; it will, of course, be filtered through the distorting lens of my particular and peculiar perspective.

Today’s basic fact, then, is that Portugal is old. I realise that this bald statement needs a little elaboration and context, so let’s talk about Montreal. When I started working as a technical writer, my first business trip abroad was to Montreal. When I mentioned this to friends and work colleagues, all the North Americans assured me that I would love Montreal because it was so old.

I’m not sure what I was expecting, and I certainly hadn’t thought this through, but, when I had a chance to look around the city a little, it wasn’t quite what I had been led to expect. There were a couple of charming corners, but it was mostly just a modern city. It was only when I had made several further trips across the Atlantic, and seen St Louis, Dallas, Seattle, Atlanta, and other cities, that I understood. For a North American city, Montreal is indeed unusually old. However, for a European who knows London, Paris or Budapest, Venice, Florence or Rome, Montreal is nothing very special. There’s old, and then there’s o-o-o-ld.

Since I count some ex-Montrealers (by birth or adoption) among my regular readers, I should hastily add that, over a number of later trips, I grew very fond of the city, resenting only the fact that on my winter trips (and, let’s face it, most trips to Montreal are winter trips, whenever you go), my eyebrows tended to freeze up.

It strikes me that different countries, different cities, wear their age differently. Almost all of my travel has been on business, to major cities, and my opportunities to explore have usually been restricted to one Sunday, or sometimes just one evening. This means that I have a snapshot of each city. Let me share some of those subjective, undoubtedly extremely incomplete, snapshots with you, and see how many other readers I can antagonize.

First, the difference between Athens and Rome. Athens was, for me, an unexceptional, shabby city, with rundown neighbourhoods apparently inhabited by men in vests and stray dogs. The Acropolis feels completely divorced from the city. However, I must say that, even though when I climbed it I discovered the Parthenon clad, mid-renovation, in scaffolding, I still found it to be a magical place that transported me back two and a half millenia, and allowed me to completely forget the city beneath.

On the other hand, the thread of Rome’s history is woven into the very fabric of the modern city. If you walk the city at night, every time you turn a corner you discover another church, or fountain, or ruin, stunningly but tastefully lit; you have a sense of a beautiful city that had a continuous and long-running historical importance.

Then there is Dublin, where you find isolated pockets of Georgian architectural splendour, single magnificent buildings or entire elegant streets: all memorials to the brief period at the end of the 18^th Century when Ireland enjoyed prosperity. Of the centuries of poverty and obscurity on either side of that brief period, nothing much remains. From 1800, the city appears to have leapt to the 1990s, and a brief period of EU prosperity and expansion.

Of course, there is also London, where there are a mere handful of national treasures from before the Great Fire of 1666 – including the Tower of London, Westminster Abbey, Westminster Hall, and Guildhall – but a wealth of glorious architecture from every period since 1666, starting with Wren’s churches. There are streets in Central London that you can walk down and view fine examples of architecture from every century from the 17^th to the 21^st. Whether you regard that as a ghastly mishmash or a glorious riotous celebration is a matter of taste.

Which brings me to Jerusalem, and Israel in general. London’s divider, 1666, is a very thin line; Israel’s is a great swathe. In Israel, if you find anything more than 120 years old, it will almost certainly be more than 2000 years old. The presence of the distant past is inescapable. Scarcely can a road be laid or an underground carpark built without some archaeological find being uncovered. Just in the last few weeks, a prehistoric copperworks has been unearthed, which may contain the earliest known example of a smelting furnace in the world. So far as distinctive city architecture is concerned, Israel’s World Heritage masterpiece is the Bauhaus architecture of Tel Aviv, Israel’s first modern city.

Ah! I was supposed to be writing about Portugal, wasn’t I?

While Portugal cannot compete with Rome, or Jerusalem, it is old. As you explore its towns and cities, you can see buildings, intact or in ruins, that reflect the centuries of its history. As I have written earlier, Penamacor itself shows evidence of the last 900 years of occupation. Indeed, there is an important archaeological dig going on there at the moment.

Portugal is the oldest nation-state in Europe, in the sense that it has had the same borders since 1139, when Alfonso Henriques was proclaimed the first King of Portugal. England could have been a contender for this title; sadly it has been, in contrast to Portugal, unable to sit still over the last 400 years; instead it has been fiddling around, adding Wales and Scotland here, Ireland there, and then losing most of Ireland again. Throughout all of these upheavals, Portugal has remained constant and unchanging.

When you’ve been around that long, you acquire some other age records along the way. The English first gave military aid to Portugal in 1147, during the Siege of Lisbon, which ended with Portugal taking Lisbon from the Moors. After thinking about it for over 200 years, the two countries eventually signed the Anglo-Portuguese Alliance in 1373. Since then, they have been coming to each other’s aid against such common enemies as Spain, France and Germany. Even in the Second World War, when Portugal carefully maintained neutrality, it offered significant humanitarian assistance to Allied civilians and some logistic assistance to Allied military forces. The Alliance still stands, and is the oldest extant diplomatic alliance in the world.

Livraria Bertrand in Lisbon is the oldest bookstore in the world. It has been trading since 1732 (beating the Moravian Bookshop in Pennsylvania by 13 years). Of course, Bertrand has not been in the same premises all that time: It was forced to move in the aftermath of a massive earthquake, and has only been in its current premises since 1755.

And, finally, Portugal was the world’s first genuinely global empire. In 1494, the Treaty of Tordesillas gave Portugal the eastern half of the New World, including Brazil and parts of Africa and Asia. Portugal’s empire actually lasted from 1415, when Cueta, a port on the Northern coast of Morocco, was captured, until 1999, when Macau was handed over to China.

The more I read about Portugal, the more it seems to have in common with Britain. There’s even the explanation of how Portuguese Jewish exiles brought fried fish to England (via Holland). The breadcrumb batter served to make palatable the fish that was fried on Friday to be eaten cold on shabbat.