Rome and Silversea Day 11

Start of day: Portimão, Portugal
End of day: Heading to Lisbon (final night aboard)

Portimão, today’s stop, is a sun-washed port city on Portugal’s Algarve coast, set where the Arade River meets the Atlantic.

A Silversea shuttle-bus schedule sign on the cruise pier in Portimão, Portugal, dated Thursday, May 14, 2026, listing departure times between the pier and the city center, with a uniformed crew member at a podium behind it

A short way upriver sits Silves, once the splendid capital of the Moorish Algarve – a topic we’d spend the morning learning about on our first of two shore excursions.

Silves

The side of a tour coach at the Portimão pier, with a Silversea excursion placard in the window reading '1 POA-B The Moorish City of Silves'

A bed of bright yellow lantana flowers in the foreground of a parking area in Silves, with a parked car, tour coaches, and tree-covered hills beyond under a clear blue sky

A round wooden stool top branded with the logo of the Silves Junta de Freguesia (parish council), featuring a stylized horseshoe-arch motif

We made our way into town through the Mercado Municipal de Silves, the covered municipal market. It’s a bright, airy hall under a pitched glass-and-timber roof, ringed with whitewashed arches and lined with stalls of fish, fruit, and local goods.

The arched stone entrance to the Mercado Municipal de Silves, with a straw scarecrow figure dressed in plaid standing out front and shoppers passing through the glass doors behind it

The bright, skylit interior of a hall in Silves with exposed wooden roof trusses and white arched alcoves along the walls, filled with a tour group of visitors

We also visited the town’s archaeology museum, which is built around a striking centerpiece: a deep, stone-lined Moorish well-cistern some 800 years old and nearly 18 meters deep.¹ The galleries arranged around it trace Silves through its many layers – Phoenician², Roman, and Moorish – back to the days when this quiet hill town was a thriving Islamic capital.

Inside the Silves municipal archaeology museum, visitors look down from an upper balcony at excavated stone ruins surrounding a large medieval well capped with a circular glass cover, with lit display cases of artifacts along the walls

A red-painted slatted bench against a deep-red wall in Silves, beneath a blue-and-white azulejo tile mural depicting the town, flanked by yucca plants and terracotta pots on a cobbled courtyard

From the museum we walked up through town to the cathedral, stopping briefly, and then on to the castle. The Castelo de Silves is the best-preserved Moorish castle in Portugal and the largest in the Algarve. It’s built from the local red sandstone, which gives the walls their reddish color, and goes back to the centuries of Moorish rule, when Silves was the regional capital.

An elevated view over a formal garden in Silves with a long green reflecting pool, tall cypress trees, brick-paved paths, a low modern building on the left, and a Portuguese flag with rolling green hills beyond

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Algarve caves

In the afternoon I did a RIB tour of the sea caves along the Algarve coast. The whole stretch is golden limestone that the ocean has carved into arches, sea stacks, caves, and little beaches you can only reach by water. The boat took us right inside several of them, including the famous Benagil cave east of Portimão, where part of the roof has collapsed into a big round skylight (people call it the “eye to heaven”), letting sunlight down onto the beach inside.

Looking up from inside a sea cave on the Algarve coast at a circular skylight opening in the cave's collapsed roof, the golden-orange rock framing a patch of bright blue sky

View from a boat of towering golden-ochre sea cliffs along the Algarve coast, with a small hidden sandy beach tucked at their base and the boat's inflatable tube visible in the foreground

The last night

Somehow I made it through the day without getting sunburned!

As this was our last evening onboard, we again dined as a group at the S.A.L.T. restaurant, the same place we started the voyage.

A farewell group dinner aboard the Silver Spirit — guests seated along a marble table set with white wine and water glasses, in a restaurant decorated with framed blue-and-white porcelain artwork

Guests at the farewell group dinner aboard the Silver Spirit, including a man in a cream linen suit, seated along a marble table beneath a large framed blue-and-white porcelain plate print

Four women smiling at the camera at the farewell group dinner aboard the Silver Spirit, seated at a marble table set with wine glasses in the ship's restaurant

Footnotes:

The stairs in the foreground wrap around the outside of the well. Visitors can descend a few meters and peer through one of the windows into the well. There are several other windows around the well at varying depths, so that water remains accessible. ↩
Thank the Phoenicians! ↩

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