O Meu Diário de Coimbra

Little change

European Route 1 (E1), which begins in the United Kingdom, stops at the Celtic Sea, as all good roads should, and then picks up again in Northern Ireland before passing through Ireland. It then takes another break for the Atlantic Ocean and the Bay of Biscay before acting like a normal road again, resuming in Northern Spain, the area above Portugal, running through Portugal itself, and then returning and ending in the south of Spain in Seville. (And because Europeans like to fuck with us — I can see no other reason — E1 is also the name of the 7,114 kilometers (4,420 miles) Long-Distance Hiking Trail from Norway to Italy.) In Portugal, the E1, the actual highway, is called the A1 (Autoestrada do Norte) and, once in Coimbra, you take Exit 12, Coimbra Sul, to get to N1/ Av. Fernão de Magalhães, which will take you to the center of town. Last Wednesday, coming down the exit was a motorcade from Lisbon — a half dozen Mercedes, followed by four or five vans, followed by police motorcycles, followed by an ambulance. A dozen local police officers, give or take a few, mulled around at the bottom of the ramp, some temporarily stopping traffic on the side streets, others just talking amongst themselves, as the official cars with tiny national flags fluttering alongside their rearview mirrors drove by.

Pedestrians were not shooed away.

“What’s going on?” I asked an officer with the Polícia de Segurança Pública (PSP)