A more relaxed day so far (we haven’t yet had dinner). We walked about 15 minutes to our meeting point for our all-day tour to Sintra. Our group of eight included two ladies, friends from San Francisco and Dublin; a family of three from Sicily (only the son spoke English and some Portuguese); and a second-year student from Austin traveling in Portugal for a week by herself.
This has been a day that, strangely, has been filled with recollections, an emotion not common when visiting a city you’ve never been to before.
Portugal was the final leg of my parents’ final trip, at age 85 (I believe) in a long life of travel around the world. This time it was a cruise from Brazil across the Atlantic to Portugal. While in Lisbon my dad toured Sintra with Enrique, our friend from Madrid, Mom stayed at the hotel: “It’s just an allergy,” she said. It turned out to be a life-threatening bout of pneumonia and aspergillus infection from which she took three months to recover. As we climbed the steep path through the palace’s garden I wondered, “How did Dad do this at his age?” And, I thought, “Tick Tok. He was only 14 years older than I am right now!”
Second, while walking to dinner this evening we strolled down a wide pedestrian thoroughfare lined with shops and with enough linen-covered dining tables in the middle of the street to feed a small New Hampshire town. Along the way was a man playing a wood saw with a violin bow. Beautiful and unique, sure, but it brought back memories of a night with my mom in Montmartre, Paris where we saw a man playing the same instrument. That memory has stuck with me for these fifty-plus years and it brought back a stream of memories from that trip.
And dinner: we’re back after a most memorable meal, one that featured some of the best fish we’ve ever eaten and some of the best service we’ve ever experienced. We couldn’t decide between the corvina and the pompo fish – fresh and on special tonight – so our waiters served us two courses: first a half-serving each of corvina and then a half serving each of pompo. Another waiter (we had three) suggested his favorite desert, which we split. Another waiter suggested a green wine from his home district just north of Porto. We’ll pass through that region in a few days. The green wine brought back another flood of memories of my mom. On the same Paris trip we visited Barcelona. After chasing her up one side of Barcelona and down the other for three days – that woman could walk your legs off – we went to the Barcelona waterfront and had the most marvelous paella with a bottle of, you guessed it, green wine.
Sintra, our target for today, started out as a monastery, turned into a royal summer palace and ended up what it is today: a major tourist attraction. And a great attraction it is: weirdly interesting architecture (I hesitate to use the word “beautiful’), a very interesting a different formal garden and great views of the Atlantic Ocean.
The garden portion, planted on the side of a mountain and through which we walked to reach the palace, looked like a totally natural forest, not a garden like Versailles. But in fact it was a “romantic” garden, carefully planned with exotic species (including, for example, sequoia trees). This was, after all, the early nineteenth century.
The palace itself was dictated by the King Consort, Queen Marie II’s husband. I guess the queen’s consort doesn’t have much to keep himself busy (see Prince Phillip, for example) so Fredrick bought, with his own money, the decrepit monastery and turned it into a summer palace to beat the heat when things got hot in downtown Lisbon. It’s an eclectic mixture of Moorish, Baroque, Manueline/Portuguese and gothic architecture styles. You have to see it to believe it!
I swore when we left home that I wasn’t going to prattle on and on about history. But darn it all, the story of Sintra is really, to me at least, interesting. So fair warning: skip what follows and look at the pictures. I’m doing it just for me.
First, the monastery part. Remember how Vasco de Gama conquered India and stole the spice trade from Venice and the Arabs? Back in the late 1400s? De Gama and his successor Albuquerque brought incredible wealth to their king, Dom Manuel I. And what does any good Catholic king do when he gets filthy rich? He builds a monastery, this one on top of the hill where his daddy liked to hunt. Manuel also built countless other edifices, so many that today Portuguese architecture is termed Manueline. To quote Wikipedia:
The Manueline (Portuguese: estilo manuelino, IPA: [ɨʃˈtilu mɐnweˈɫinu]), or Portuguese late Gothic, is the sumptuous, composite Portuguesestyle of architectural ornamentation of the first decades of the 16th century, incorporating maritime elements and representations of the discoveries brought from the voyages of Vasco da Gama and Pedro Álvares Cabral.
The monastery housed 18 contemplative monks from 1493 until the earthquake of 1755 destroyed everything except the chapel which, some would say, was spared by God. Nonetheless, it remained in ruins until King Consort Ferdinand II bought the place and built it into the summer kick-back palace.
Ferdinand II was born in 1816 in Austria, a member of that mixed up mess of 19thCentury European aristocrats. Don’t get me started, but just to give you the flavor, Ferdinand was first cousin to both Queen Victoria and her husband Prince Albert. I never figured out why, but he ended up marrying Marie II, the Queen of Portugal. Ferdinand was a nobody, according to the rules, until he fathered a child by the Queen. He then became King Consort Ferdinand II.
Marie’s story is as tangled as her (second) husband Ferdinand’s. Remember Napoleon’s invasion back in the early 1800s? The then king of Portugal, Joao VI high tailed it to Brazil rather than face the music back home. When the Portuguese finally restored order, Joao faced a problem. He had fallen in love with Brazil and declared Brazil and Portugal united as one with headquarters in Brazil. After the revolution he had to decide who to send back to Lisbon to be king: his elder son Pedro or his younger son Miguel. Miguel had been exiled by the revolutionary forces, but Joao feared that if he named Pedro as king his boys would squabble and fight a civil war.
Solution! Send granddaughter seven-year-old Marie to Portugal to be queen, with Miguel as her regent and betrothed to-be husband. Miguel agreed with his fingers crossed. As soon as he and Marie hit shore, he sent Marie off into exile and declared himself king. That did indeed kick off a six-year Liberal War that resulted in Marie II returning from Brazil to take over as Queen. When her first husband died, she married Ferdinand who fathered 11 children. Marie died giving birth to her 11thchild.
And brother/father Pedro? He was King of Brazil as Pedro I and briefly King of Portugal as Pedro IV before Marie took over. And, he’s the one standing on top of the statue in our square just outside the door of our hotel here in Lisbon. Look for a picture of Judy pointing to a statue off in the distance. That’s Pedro IV and he’s our guidepost when searching for our hotel.
After Sintra our guide drove us to an ocean viewpoint at Cabo da Roca and the seaside village of Cascais. All in all, a pleasant and interesting day. But like I said, it was a slacker day. Judy logged only 13,185 steps and mere 4.37 miles but did up the floor count to 58. “I was really amazed that you could almost keep up with me climbing those hills at the palace today,” said our 40-something lady guide to Judy. Good goin’ old girl!
Tomorrow, the hop-on hop-off bus on our own (no guide) to see what we can see. The bus starts running at 9:30 so we can sleep in a bit.
