Today was the first day that Fes and I met up with “the rest of our group”, aka the folks we would be sailing with on the following day. Our group is a College of Curiosity travel group, who get together to do travel (usually cruises) a couple times per year. I usually don’t do cruises (not my style of travel), but this was an unusual one, so I signed up. (I’ll detail about the cruise in upcoming posts.) The full group is, I think, about 40 people. Today’s plans involved 21 of them, many of whom I’ve known for years from other travels, various conventions, and online forums.
We all scrambled together at the Hotel Lisboa (of which there are dozens), in spite of road closures due to to a marathon, comedies of errors in flights, and other ordeals. I think Fes and I are the ones who had been in Lisbon the longest and were thus the only people who didn’t have a challenge getting to our meeting place.
As everyone gathered, we greeted each other, hugged, and made introductions. The plan for our day: a full-day, private tour of Sintra, Portugal.
We soon clambered onto a bus with our guide and drove off into the interior of Portugal. Sintra is about 30-45 minutes by car outside Lisbon, nestled into steep hills amid dense greenery and blooming flowers. The old town is set into the hillside, with cobbled, steep roads leading up into quaint old neighborhoods and, as it turns out, a multitude of castles and palaces.
The first half of our day brought us to the Quinta da Regaleira, a World Heritage Site. It’s a manor built by Antonio Augusto Carvalho Monteiro in the 1900s, a beautiful folly of a place full of gardens, grottos, and waterfalls. The grounds are lush and immaculately kept, the real star of the show over and above the manor itself.
The original owner of the house meant for the grounds to be a spiritual journey, and each statue, construction, and fountain refer to purgatory and rebirth. The most stunning part (that we saw, anyway) as a sort of purgatory maze. We entered into a rock outcropping and found ourselves descending many stories into a sort of inverted tower, spiraling into darkness. Once at the bottom, we found ourselves in an underground maze, with loops and dark corners and a dead end behind a waterfall. Eventually we found the one exit and found ourselves back in the green, sunny gardens.
Also on the grounds is an ornate chapel, bridges over pools, and artificial lakes. There are lovingly-carved statues of hunting dogs, strange gargoyles, many terraces, and stones placed to collect the light of the sunrise. After all this, the manor itself looks modest.
I found the place delightful, as it lacked much of the ostentatiousness of royal palaces. (Carvalho Monteiro was bourgeoisie, not royalty.) Yes, it’s a show of money, but there is a playfulness and appreciation of nature in this place. Fes and I felt like we barely got to see the grounds in the time we were there; we would have happily spent the whole day exploring here.
