A Walker in the Suburbs

If I didn’t know better I’d say that Portugal is deliberately making it hard on us. For our last day here she dished out some of the most splendid weather we’ve had on this already blue-sky trip. Then she landed us here in Sintra, city of kings, although I’ll take some responsibility for that since I planned the itinerary. 

Finally, there were today’s attractions. Whereas yesterday’s visit to the Pena Palace was a bit like being herded into a cattle car, this afternoon’s tour of the National Palace was deliciously free of crowds. 

And in the morning—ah!—there was Quinta da Regaleira, a villa on grounds that include a mossy green spiral staircase that I’d seen in photos and which lived up to its photogenic reputation—though after walking down it with two millennials we met on the way there, I’d say it requires the bold approach of holding one’s cameras over the void to snag the perfect shot (see above for a less-than-perfect one).  

Castles are not built on plains or in valleys. They are situated on mountaintops and hillsides. But what happens when the castle becomes a major tourist destination? In short, gridlock.

To avoid the crush we skipped the bus to Pena Palace and the Moorish Castle today and hiked up instead. The guidebook said it was a trail only to be undertaken by “serious hikers,” but that didn’t deter us. 

Hike it we did, both up and down, and though the knees are sore, the mind is full of the sights we saw along the way.  

This post should be titled “Rooms with a View” since every room we’ve stayed in on this trip has opened onto a terrace or a plaza or a sea of red-tiled roofs.  

From one of them we could hear the Atlantic Ocean rolling up on the sand. From another we could almost touch the medieval walls of Evora.

But today’s hotel, our final resting place before returning home on Sunday, is the highlight of them all. Perched on a hill that overlooks the National Palace, our room has a tall half-moon window with a fairytale castle outside. A quick walk through town confirmed the fairytale castle-ness of the place. 

Sintra has palaces to tour and gardens to admire … but it’s tempting to just sit here and look out the window.

Since my earliest travels, I developed the habit of not wanting to leave the places I visited. I can still remember the tears I shed leaving San Francisco at age 15. For years I pined for that place.

In time, I learned to move on from these travel crushes, but that doesn’t mean I don’t form attachments to places, sometimes so suddenly and with such a rush of feeling that I wonder if I haven’t lived there in a past life.

It’s happening again with Evora (pronounced EV’ or ah), a walled city we’ve been touring the last few days. Maybe it’s because I saw it first from a distance, a cathedral on a hill, or maybe it’s because an hour after we landed here we were whisked away on a tour of the megaliths, which got us out into the rolling countryside where we could see the cork oaks and menhirs.

But whatever the reason, Evora has spoken to me: its medieval walls, its old folks clustering around the obituary notices in the town square, the little restaurant hunkered down beside the 16th-century aqueduct, the lovingly casual way this place embraces the past. I want to bottle Evora and take it home with me.

It’s hard to miss Evora’s Roman Temple, sitting as it does in the middle of the town square. What’s amazing is how well-preserved it is, more intact than many of the Roman ruins in Rome, thanks to being covered for centuries, first as a fortress and then as a slaughterhouse.

Scattered throughout the city are other ancient surprises, like the Roman baths tucked away in a corner of the Town Hall, which flash into view courtesy of motion-detected lighting. (They were discovered during a remodel in 1987.)  

Or these paving stones, irregularly shaped and polished to a high gloss from almost two millennia of use.

Two thousand years before Stonehenge, the people who built the Almendres Cromlech were lugging large rocks into place and setting them up to align with the equinox. Were they gathering there to tell stories? Perform rituals? Trade knowledge?  Maybe all of the above. 

It’s not hard to imagine how a resident of the 14th century would feel looking west from Cape Saint Vincent on Portugal’s southwest coast. This was land’s end, as far as you could go. Europe ended here, and there was not yet a “New World.”

The Portuguese prince known as Henry the Navigator sought to change that. He taught sailing and navigation skills, provided funds for expeditions to Africa and Madeira, and influenced generations of explorers. 

Henry’s inspiration in part was Marco Polo’s Il Milione, a travel book that was also a source for Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, which we studied last semester. Such is the power of imagination that even today, hundreds of years later, standing on the windswept heights of Henry’s fortress, I could glimpse the danger and the curiosity these views provoked. 

This path was first trod by fishermen as they walked from village to village and down to the sea. Now it’s part of a network of trails that run through protected land, and the people who travel it are carrying cameras not nets.  At least one of them (that would be me) was thinking that there could be no better way to see the Algarve than to hike this beautiful trail.