Madeira - Day 5 -Fortaleza Sao Tiago

I had done more than 16,000 steps yesterday according to my fitbit, so gave my legs a break and took the bus downhill today.

Wandering some more of the narrow streets

in the old town

there were still lots

of doorways

to be seen.

Even painted garage doors.

But this depicts where I was headed,

the fortress, built to protect the town,

in 1614.

The entrance fee allows you to walk the battlement walls

and peer out to sea

or down at the black, gravelly "beach" where people were sunbathing and swimming.

I sat on a sunny piece of the wall and did my first sketch of the trip.

Two rooms were open with some photographs of restoration procedures.

The fortress also houses a restaurant and they offer a package in which you are picked up from your hotel, and returned, in a classic car. So many ways to make money off tourists. Tourism is the major economic driver here, along with wine and sugar (sugar cane plantations)

Walking back past a park there were tables surrounded by men. 4 of them would be playing cards and the rest were spectators.

Upon looking it up on the internet I learned that it is called Sueca and uses Ace, 7, King, Queen, Jack, 6,5,4,3,2 in that order.
Very little is known about the origins of Sueca. The rules of the game are passed down generationally, but vary slightly from region to region in Portugal, its archipelagos of Madeira and Azores and its former colonial territories of Brazil, Angola and Mozambique.
According to Wikipedia.