Monks that give comfort to sailors?

One of the highlights of Lisbon is Sintra, located about 45 minutes out of town.  It has an Moorish castle plus a few villas and palaces dotted around the unusually green hilly landscape.  Due to the distance and topography, it is essential to get around these sights by bus … and that itself is rather hair-raising since they use a full-size bus on very windy narrow roads.  I find it rather odd that the Arabs were here building a fort-and-castle but (not at the same time) the Crusaders were doing likewise down in the Levant!

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The other major sight in Lisbon is in Belem, a few kilometres away from the city centre.  Much of the sights here are from the days of the Portuguese explorers in the 1500s … there’s the Jeronimos Monastery to house the monks who would give comfort to the sailors (says the guidebook, but how I wonder!) and the Torre de Belem which is a very ornate squat tower to mark the glory of their navigational successes.  In fact, everything here is very ornate … I would have said it was Gothic but that term conjures up images in my mind of black lipstick and black eye makeup.