[13D10N - Incentive Trip: Spain & Portugal] 2D1N at Salamanca

We left our Lisbon hotel after staying 2 nights. We woke up early to have our breakfast at the hotel before checking out.

We packed our luggage and headed down to the lobby to join in for the group gathering. We boarded our tour bus back to Spain. It was an approximate 5.5hour journey to Salamanca from Lisbon. During our journey to Salamanca, we made a stop at Fátima to visit the Sanctuary of Our Lady of Fátima after sitting in the tour bus for short journey of 1.5 hours.

Fátima was known to be a humble and simple little town historically, but now it is one of the most important pilgrimage destinations in Europe for Catholics.

Fátima is perhaps the most unique destination in Portugal. Nestled in the heart of central Portugal. The Sanctuary of Our Lady of Fátima is one of the greatest references of the following of Mother Mary and is visited by Catholic pilgrims from all over the world.

The tour leader gathered all of us for another self-paid lunch, but this time we declined his recommendation, and we decided to have our lunch in a restaurant which was about an 8-10 minutes walk away from where they brought us.

As we made our way out from the eatery place, some of our tour mates asked where we were going, so we told them that we were heading off somewhere else nearby to eat at an alternative place, and to our surprised, many of them joined us.

There were 10 of us (included RKM) at the Restaurante A cabana. All of us enjoyed the food, and if you are looking for traditional simple Portuguese homemade food, do not give this place a miss! The only downside was that the service was kinda slow, which forced us to gobble down our food as we were in a rush to meet the given time frame from the tour leader.

We were lucky that Mr Ng, former MD of Eastport and his wifey joined us at the lunch too, as we were given some lee time to finish up our food. Instead of walking back to meet the rest of our tour mates and the tour leader, they came over to pick us up from the restaurant instead!

After 4 hours of journey, we finally arrived back in Spain, and we started our sight-seeing immediately at The University of Salamanca (Universidad de Salamanca). It is one of the oldest universities in Spain.

Our tour took us to Plaza Mayor, which is the mainpublic square, and is the heart of Salamanca.

I loved the gothic architecture of the Salamanca Cathedral. The entrance of this cathedral was not part of the tour, so we didn’t go in but only took photos outside against the building.

The bus brought us to our hotel - Hotel Doña Brígida – Salamanca Forum as dinner was provided by the hotel itself. The dinner set started off with a large portion of salad, followed by the protein, and ended with a slice of cake. We wrapped up our dinner around 8pm, and it was then time to check into our respective room for a one-night stay.

Stay tuned for my next blogpost, as we were heading down to another city - Segovia for a day trip before our destination - Madrid.