Sintra

Tuesday, May 5

We ventured out of Lisbon today and traveled about 45 minutes to on the national railroad to Sintra, once the summer haven of Portugal's royalty.  The town center sits at the bottom of a mountain and is the site of the National Palace, with its distinctive twin cone-shaped towers.  The town's other main attractions are high up on the heavily-wooded mountain, so we took the bus up the one-way road that wound to the top.  Narrow road.  Switchbacks.  BIG bus. We'd decided to visit the Pena Palace, on the very top of the mountain, so we finished the climb on a small shuttle bus.

The Pena Palace may command the hilltop, but it's hard to imagine it dominating anything else, other than perhaps fairy tales.  Constructed by King Ferdinand and designed by a German architect, the palace is a multicolored concoction of Moorish, Gothic, Renaissance, Portuguese Manueline, and Disney Magic Kingdom styles.  Domes, arches, parapets, reds, yellows, fantastic figures carved in stone, gorgeous tiles, a jewel of a chapel, and a small courtyard built on the site of a monastic cloister all make the palace seem right out of Fantasyland.  The interior rooms of the palace, which was used as a royal residence until the monarchy was overthrown in 1910, are on a rather small scale, and even the public rooms are far from grand; the views over the valley and to the sea were, though.

Back in the city, we wandered from Rossio, with its wavy-patterned tiled pavement, to Fig Tree (Figueira) Square and its view of the castle high on a hill, and the cavernous Church of St. Dominic.  In the large square in front of the church is a memorial to the thousands of Lisbon's Jews who were massacred there in 1506 in the Inquisition.

We finished our walk by crossing the length of the Plaza of the Restoration (Restauradores) and walking along the Avenida da Liberdade.  This is Portugal's grand boulevard; it's wide, shaded by tall trees, dotted with large, monument-dominated plazas, graced with fountains that feed a series of ponds, and, of course, paved with beautifully patterned stones -- a lovely urban oasis.

We've barely scratched Lisbon's surface, but the road calls and we'll be on our way up the coast to Porto tomorrow. 


Before closing, I have good news for any (like me!) who had doubts that we'd ever receive the rug we purchased in Fez and shipped from its non-English-speaking post office.  Our dear neighbor Mary Ann, who keeps an eagle eye on our house whenever we're away, reports that it was delivered yesterday -- what a happy surprise!