Setubal is “the city of dolphins”, home to a resident pod of bottlenose dolphins that have adapted to living in the shallows, and therefore spend much of their time in the river mouth and off the coast of the Troia penindula.
In May, our friends Brittany and Victor stopped in to see us, so we started their visit with a boat tour to meet the dolphins!
We had a terrific boat ride, saw some awesome sights, and learned a few things (true and, in one case, untrue). Afterward, we stopped for lunch in Bocage Square, and took a few minutes to visit the inside of our historic monastery and the convent next door. All in all, a terrific day!
Need more dolphins? I put the rest of our dolphin video here. You can enjoy nearly 5 minutes of Setubal cetaceans.
Untrue Stories
After JFK’s assassination, our tourguide told us, Jackie came here to the Palace of Comenda, to recover.
Our local parish council’s web site had this to say about this much-repeated legend:
It is very common to find, in magazine articles and on the Internet, references to a possible stay by the widow of US President Kennedy at the Comenda Palace after her husband’s assassination. Some “news” even point to the stay as a recovery from the shock she suffered.
But the reality is very different. That “news” is nothing more than a false rumor, one of many that circulate on the Internet and that then, over time, become something of a historical truth because it is repeated everywhere. In fact, Jacqueline Kennedy was never in the Comenda, nor in Setúbal, nor even in Portugal, at any time in her life.
But all lies may have some truth to them. Jacqueline Kennedy had a younger sister, Lee Bouvier, who married a Polish aristocrat and had two children with him. In the summer of 1964, a year after President Kennedy was assassinated, Lee Bouvier, accompanied by her children, came to Portugal and spent a few days at the Palácio da Comenda. When she arrived in Lisbon by plane, she was even met by the Undersecretary of State for Tourism, who offered her a bouquet of flowers to welcome her.
Nothing more is known about this matter as the press at the time was discreet.
As for the claim that Jacqueline Kennedy was at the Comenda, there is no basis whatsoever. After her husband’s death, she took refuge with her children in Florida, under strict security measures. It is clear that the US authorities would never allow Jacqueline Kennedy to travel to Europe, to a small country that at the time was considered almost third world and was governed by a dictatorship.
