Sintra is a town in the Greater Lisbon region, located a 40+ minute commuter train ride from Lisbon, towards the mountains. The town is renowned for its stunning architecture and cultural significance. Historically, it served as a strategic location during the Moorish occupation and later became a favored summer retreat for Portuguese royalty and aristocrats. So it has the old stones of an 8th century castle and all the fancy homes, castles (yes plural!) and gardens that come with summering royalty of the more “recent” 15th to 19th century. All of that attention left Sintra celebrated as the first center of European Romantic architecture and designated as a UNESCO World Heritage site in 1995. Sintra landmarks, and what made it gain recognition, are many. There are four that really make it shine: the ancient Moorish Castle, the romanticist Pena National Palace on the highest peak, the best preserved medieval palace in Portugal, the Sintra National Palace with its distinctive twin chimneys, and the Quinta (estate) da Regaleira with its magical gardens and the wells with staircases. All of those are large sites and two of them require a significant quantity of hiking. Some would point out there’s a bus that does all the sites and save people from hiking up and I would tell them that while I respect their choice to be squeezed like human sardines in a tin can; we will never understand it. That aside, it makes for a lot to squeeze in a single day. Our research tells us to get up at zero dark stupid to be on the first train and be able to hit all the sights. We went another way, a more sane way we would say: we opted to visit the city over two days.
Like the civilized visitors we are, we slept in, packed an overnight bag and walked half an hour to a new coffee shop we wanted to try for breakfast. 📍Volta Coffee is the epitome of the tiny specialty coffee shop that’s doing its best to be minimalist with 6 seats inside and the same amount outside. They still manage to need a team of three to service that large of a volume. One barista, one cook and one server. The benefit of dedicating people to each of the aspects of the business means that the barista can keep their coffee game on point. The coffee was excellent. They do go for a natural coffee with a fruity finish that’s less in Karine’s very specific coffee taste but they do it well. We both chose the chorizo grilled cheese (out of the very limited menu) and were happily surprised by how tasty they were.
It was a little past 13:00 when we took the train to Sintra. We had tickets to the National Palace that doesn’t require a reserved entry time and a 16:30 entrance to the Quinta (estate) da Regaleira. Arriving at 14:00 we were immediately assaulted by the line of tuktuk, unofficial taxis and tour guides throwing themselves at us to offer their services. We obviously gave the Canadian version of a hard no, the very polite: “no thank you”. We made it to our hotel, the 📍NH Sintra Centro in about 15 minutes, checked-in and dropped our bag. From there we crossed the street and started our first visit of the day.
The📍Palácio Nacional de Sintra was the royal residence from the early 15th century to the late 19th century. Most of the visit is what most people would expect from a palace of this period. All the rooms are setup to represent a portion of the history of the monarchy, the region or the palace itself. It’s well setup and offers one surprise towards the end. The most visible architectural piece of the palace is the two huge cones that are the kitchen’s chimneys. They are huge because at their base is the whole kitchen. Rows of fireplaces with pots over them span the long wall with spits toward the back, the whole cones captures the smoke and let it escape by a couple of small holes. It’s not a frequent sight when visiting castles to get the context and workings of the kitchen of the place (it takes many people for a castle to work and these people needed to be fed afterall). We enjoyed our visit but it didn’t last as long as we expected. We exited the place with more than an hour to kill before our timed entry at the 📍Quinta da Regaleira.
We decided to scout out the local coffee place. 📍Loja 5 is in the middle of a small rectangular building with a bar on the outside and a kind of food court on the inside. They have a small counter and make really good coffee for what a banner about 50 meters outside called “not the Disneyland of Lisbon”.
Caffeinated we went and got our self a little lost trying to cross the town and a bit confused trying to navigate the 📍Parque d’as Merendas. We ended up exiting it through the grounds of the next door villa (no we didn’t trounce through some rich people’s backyard, the 📍Vila Sassetti’s grounds are open to the public and serve as ashortcut to the Moorish Castle and Pena Palace). It was beautiful if a bit confusing. Nonetheless, it wasted just the right amount of time for us.
We made our entry at 📍Quinta da Regaleira and followed what our research said to do: and beeline it to the initiation well. The thing is hard to describe. It’s a 27-meter-deep subterranean tower that was never used for water (no idea why they would call it a well then). It’s a spiral staircase with nine levels and at the bottom, where there should be water, there’s instead a mosaic floor featuring a compass over a Knights Templar cross. That underground tower connects to a network of underground tunnels that link to different features of the impressive grounds of the estate. Walking the rest of the grounds after going through the wells really highlights the huge investment made to create them. Small paths branching of the winding thoroughfare with tiny staircases leading to smaller features of the gardens. There’s a large pond (they call it a lake but if that’s a lake our bathtub is probably a large pound). It was well worth the exploration.
Before dinner with did something we never do. We went to our hotel bar, found their terrace, sat down there and drank some wine. What’s unusual isn’t the couches our the wine but that we would pick our hotel’s bar. The location of the hotel affords it a beautiful view of the sunset. With the town emptying itself as the sun sets it offered a quiet place to relax.
Dinner was good but nothing special. We went to 📍Taberna Criativa. What marked us the most about dinner is not the food or the restaurant but how empty the town is once the sun has set. We barely saw people, not even a tuktuk in sight. Nobody tried to sell us anything or lure us into their car. We saw other visitors but from afar. It was a huge contrast to the crowded daytime downtown with tour groups and other smaller groups taking all the space. We enjoyed walking the quiet streets.