I’ve been wanting to check out the bike tracks in Monsanto for a while, and with my lady away partying at Super Bock Super Rock for the weekend I thought it would be a good opportunity to give it a go finally. So I made a sandwich, fixed up the bike ready to go, stuck a bottle of water in my bag and set out!
Getting to Belem was made a hell of a lot easier thanks to the brand spanking new bike paths they have installed from Cais do Sodré to Tour de Belém. If you’d never done the journey in the past you might grumble a bit about how they have been implemented, but I have to say they are an absolutely huge improvement over the old journey. When I was living in Cais do Sodré I cycled a couple of times to Belém and it mainly involved going along the Av. da Brasilia, and then around Belém it was a bit tricky navigating what with all the tourists and car parks. Now its fairly smooth sailing, admittedly theres the odd Spanish tourist that seems to think the large bicycle painted on the bike path is an invitation to saunter along it with child in hand, and there is the odd section that is not very well signposted, but its still brilliant that you can pretty much cycle all the way there without needing to cycle along a road.
Arriving to Cais do Sodré is also pretty painless these days, I cycled along Rua do Jardim do Tobaco, but then had to cut back to the main road because the road is closed. I wouldn’t recommend cycling on the main road though, but you can cycle pretty well alongside the pavement next to the river. And thanks to the works on the new park just after praça do comércio, you can cycle along a car-free part of the road all the way until Cais do Sodré.
Arriving at the Torre de Belém I take a well earned break and checked out the view. Then since it was such a breeze getting there I decided to intrepidly head up to Monsanto. Problem is however much I’d scoured the internet the night before, there is very little information about bike paths on the internet (or at least i havent found any). There are a few sites with trails on them, but there wasn’t anything official i could find with a decent map telling you a good place to get started. So I just used my GPS on my phone and headed up Avenue da Torre de Belém into Restelo. Restelo is where the rich and embassies reside, absolutely stunning place, if you have millions of euros to throw about would definitely be a nice place to have a pad. I hung a left at some point and tried to enter the green bit my GPS was showing me, thinking perhaps I could access the park, but ended up in a closed road that was military access only, there is some kind of fort there. Not wanting to be shot down or deported for being a naughty Englishman I decided not to cycle through the fort, but hit the main road and then made my way to Avenue dos Bombeiros. Here I hit the goldpot with a proper map and everything welcoming you to the park, yay!
After cycling up the road a bit I saw a decidedly pathy looking thing and jumped onto it, and then I got stuck into some proper off-road cycling action, which was very cool! Not a person in sight even, hard to believe you are in the middle of Lisbon practically! With my GPS, a bit of guess work and my reasonably decent sense of direction I managed to wiggle through mostly on paths all the way to what seems the highest point of the park, with a forest of radio transmitters. One crappy thing about the park is that the paths are signposted very minimalistically , you get the odd stump of wood on the floor with a picture of a bike on and if you are lucky the name of the path, but nothing else. No signs with directions or length of path or nicely colour coded stumps with number of km on, its all a bit confusing. The good thing about this though is that it seems relatively unused, I passed literally two groups of two cyclist the couple of hours I was there, there was absolutely no one there.
On the map I had come across when I first entered the park there was all kinds of picnic spots shown, but I only seemed to pass one which was infested with a huge group of peasants that seemed to live there, so I decided to skip past that one. At 1:30 I gave up trying to find the perfect spot and ate my sandwich in a little grassy spot with a bit of shade that I found next to the path i was riding on.
Anyhow I should probably cut this short now, as I hate huge blathery blog posts (by other people of coures). I opted more for the bigger roads ( which are still very quiet in the park) on my way back, and managed to reach Restelo pretty easily. I passed this strange ghost restaurant at the end of Estrada do Outeiro ( a nice closed road just for bikes etc ) which might be a nice place to stop for lunch in future, great views of the city if you go through the garden at the back and head to the miradouro. Going back from Belém was a bit of a struggle with the full heat of the day at 14:00, and my tired legs, there was no way I was gonna make the last hill up to my flat in Graça so after cycling up the first half i slung my bike on my shoulder and staggered up the steps there. Of course a local woman had to comment that her son or something cycles up this hill every week 
Well she was just being friendly, and after letting her go on up ahead of me i finally limped back home.
So if you are needing some proper punishment I would recommend this, but maybe in future just either Stª Apolónia – Belém or a trip around Monsanto would be sufficient!
