Chapter 12 Iberia, November, 2025

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Chapter 12

 

Iberia, November, 2025

 

Prologue 

 

This trip was 4 days in Lisbon, 8 days sailing the Douro River, including a bus trip to Salamanca Spain, and a flight to Madrid for 3 days of tours.

 

The following are some reflections; not a travelogue. It was a great trip. Our very first overseas trip was to Madrid in 1978 and we were eager to re-familiarize ourselves. It is even more stunning than I remembered.

 

Southern Europe is Changing

 

We’ve heard this frequently in Italy, and across the Mediterranean these last few years, but we saw it in real time in Portugal as we spent many days in small towns along the Douro River to visit how Port is produced. Europe is in transition. 

 

While we, the so-called, enlightened Aussies, Brits, Canadians and Americans flock to Europe to experience a bit of history, culture and culinary delights,  Europe (at least Portugal and Italy) as we knew it is fast becoming an open air museum. 

 

The young people are leaving; small villages and towns are losing total population, and the bigger cities are being transformed by an exodus of the young and educated out of the country, and they are being replaced by immigrants from the Middle East and Africa. 

 

We’ve been to villages in Portugal this trip with only 150 people left; a town that has shrunk from 23,000 to 20,000 in 10 years, etc.

 

Technology, in all of it’s forms, is the driving force behind these changes as the charming and slow paced way of life that we Westerners come to witness gives way to a loss of manufacturing, a loss of farming, a loss of craftsmanship and a breakdown of the family unit. The young people are better educated and feel connected to the larger world thanks to their smart phones and don’t want to live the lives their parents lived. So they go to Dubai and pursue professional careers.

 

The Russian invasion and the horrors of that war has led to a diaspora of Ukrainians. Portugal has welcomed these refugees as an offset to the loss of population it has incurred over the last 20 years. The service industries are brimming over with people from Pakistan and the Middle East. But these immigrants are not coming to live in a small village to make Port; they are creating a population surge in the already big cities like Lisbon and Porto. Madrid will grow from about 3 million to 5 million in the next few years.

 

Portuguese Port sales have been decreasing globally while at the same time grape production along the Douro has been decreasing- but becoming more efficient using more machines; hence the need for fewer people. I think we bought enough Port to keep the local economy humming along.

 

We chuckled when the Lisbon taxi driver complained about how a Ukrainian is taking advantage of the system and “is driving a Bentley even though he is on the dole”. 

 

RIVER CRUISING

 

We have come to enjoy river cruising. It is what adult sleep away camp would or could or should be. 24/7, eight or 11 or 15 days of structured time for the guests provided by a spectacularly trained staff delivering a service protocol that they deliver flawlessly. 

 

Back in the real world, people talk about their careers; their jobs, their kids; but on-board, you hear nothing but chatter about places people have  been, or still want to go. There is no sense of competition; everyone on-board has seemingly won the game of life and there is no need to showcase one’s success.

 

My guess is 80% of the guests on- board are retired and 20% are in the late stages of their careers where they can make the time and have the funds to get away. 

 

Based on many conversations with fellow guests, I would speculate that most of the 80% are traveling multiple times a year. It is not a vacation, it is what they do- they travel. So when you hear late stage career people say that when they retire that they “want to travel”; they will probably segment into 1- a cohort that travels when they can or 2- into a cohort that is packing their bags 2, 3 or 4 times a year. 

 

I’d love to see the research about heavy users of travel.

 

A quick word about the crew on the Scenic Azure. We learned that they are the only ship in the Scenic fleet that is comprised 100% by locals. And wow, are they proud of their country and their ship. Their attention to detail and their desire to prevent surprises from disrupting anyone’s experience was enlightened. The staff would explain what we were going to do, we would do it and then they would review it. In fact, on the night of the Scenic Enrichment event, a concert done on this trip in Porto in a magnificent church, the Tour Director made a point to say that if anyone didn’t want to walk to the church on a rainy night and climb the steps to the entrance that she would play a recording of a previous Enrichment event so those people would not feel left out. That is impressive to be prepared for such a need and to care enough for everyone to be included.

 

EXTENSIONS

 

Cruises are typically preceded by and/or followed by, what is called an extension. Extensions come in all different forms, usually driven by a desire to leverage the cost of airfare. Typically we have done the pre and/or post extension of a planned vacation by ourselves. 

 

We chose to let our cruise provider, Scenic, manage the entire Extension process  for this trip and it was very nice to be managed from the moment we arrived in Lisbon to the drop-off in the Madrid airport. Transfers to/from airports and hotels, internal flights, hotels, a few group dinners, etc. No thinking, just doing. And, no tipping! Built in to the price are all the gratuities you would usually fumble about and try to smoke out what others are doing about tipping. The completeness of this experience made each day seamless. We found this level of seamlessness to be relaxing and a vacation enhancement. 

 

I was asked by a dinner companion to critique the cruise. As always, I declined to do so. The variables that result in customer satisfaction are many and often unique to a person’s experience and I don’t consider my experience to be universal. Plus, everyone has their own personal favorite brand for idiosyncratic reasons. 

 

Personally, we really appreciated the true all inclusiveness of this experience. In two weeks, our only credit card use was for meals not included in Lisbon and Madrid. Everything on the ship is included, meaning all drinks and your choice of daily excursions. 

 

Madrid is special. The architecture is grand; like the capitol of a major country should be. The food is superb, the tapas are everywhere and the people are teeming in the streets with no feeling of danger. Madrid had 94 million tourist visits in 2024. making it a European leader. They seem to have excellent city planning services as they have big projects underway to create more access to the city underground, more subways and even underground freeways.

 

Lisbon is a city I used to go to regularly back in the day but it has been more than 10 years and while it has the feel of being a secondary capitol city, it is charming. We had an informative overview tour by bus that included going out to visit the old castle in Sintra, and to the beach in Cascais.

 

We’ve now sailed the Danube, the Rhine and the Douro. In April we will sail the Rhone. There is no perfect sequence of rivers to cruise on but river cruising has become an important part of a three legged travel strategy that includes, land based trips and also ocean cruising.

 

As I write we are returning home for 10 days before we head to Miami to sail on the brand new Oceania Allura to visit the Caribbean for 11 days; returning just before Xmas..

 

Onward!