We went for the best rated brunch we could find in the town of Sintra. We should have seen the result coming. As we’ve established yesterday, Sintra is a day trip town for most people. The food scene is optimized to serve lunch near the sights. Breakfast is probably quite underserved. 📍Salus Brunch Garden is representative of that. Nothing we were served was bad, but it wasn’t good either. I’ll use an old example that really hit me this morning. Everywhere we’ve been that served us sustenance instead of food, especially for breakfast but I would argue it applies everywhere, drown their stuff in balsamic reductions. It’s like if they don’t know how to make a dish they just do what they think it should be and drown that poor execution under balsamic so it looks “fancy”. As a result, I’m ready to institute a new restaurant selection criteria: if we see more than one picture of a dish drowned in balsamic reduction in their food pictures, no matter the review score, this place will be disappointing and will be skipped.
Disappointing breakfast aside, we stopped for good coffee at 📍Loja 5 ahead of our 12:00 brunch reservation. The coffee kept us happy, that’s what I’m saying.
Our first stop of the day was the 📍Mourish Castle. To get there we had to hike through the 📍Villa Sassetti’s gardens. The villa itself was on the list of places to visit but we had to make choices when we planned our day. The gardens is essentially a long series of switchbacks through manicured trees and plant beds while getting uphill (everything is either uphill or downhill in Sintra, I won’t be pointing it out every time). There’s even signage pointing the way to the top exit of the garden with estimated distances to the Moorish Castle and the 📍Pena Palace; the latter being our second and last stop for the day.
The 📍Mourish Castle is from the 8th century. There’s no inside to visit but the walls are in surprisingly good shape (I assume a lot of restoration work happened). We were able to walk the walls for the the full circumference of the castle. The thing is, the castle is on top of a hill. There’s no information panel, no other content, context or explanation within it. It’s beautiful walls and gorgeous views all around! It’s also about a 30-minute visit and a little more than a 3km hike from the village to the castle around it.
We had planned for an hour and a half. We also had planned for the hike to 📍Pena Palace to take an hour and, while it’s easily doable in 45 minutes for anybody who beelines to the palace from the castle, that would be a mistake of galactic proportions (huge doesn’t cut it as a descriptor). The palace, to everybody utter bafflement, is within the Pena Park (which happens to be within the 📍Parque Natural de Sintra-Cascais). The palace grounds are huge. How huge might you ask? The royals’ cottage is within the grounds of the palace. Somehow they figured the palace grounds were big enough to require a second home on it. We spent an hour and a half exploring the park and could have spent another hour or two and not have visited the same place twice. The grounds are gorgeous, full of small paths that invite you to meander and explore, all of it under the shade of trees. We enjoyed it so much that our recommendation would be: if you could only do one site, do the grounds and not the palace. Why that situation would occur we would not know as doing both is best but in the hypothetical world where that would be a thing, don’t hesitate and spend time exploring the grounds.
We weren’t sure what to expect from the📍Pena Palace itself. Palaces can be very reconstructed affairs with fake everything or a long series of empty rooms. It is rarely an “in situ” museum. That was the palace. It doesn’t overflow with context and the visit is fairly short but well worth the time and the timed entry (ours was at 17:00). Following the visit circuit can be a little challenging at some point but the hassle is well worth it. The stag room, one of the first on the visitor’s path, was something to behold. It’s a dining room built around a central column (one seated at the round table would not be able to see the person sitting across from them as there would be a pillar in the way). It is, however, ornate in a strangely fascinating way. The inside of the palace reflects the outside. A series of different styles mashed together in a way that oddly works.
We hiked down the way we came up and grabbed the next train back to Lisbon. We had a dinner reservation in town we did not mean to miss. The one-hour ride back was uneventful and having planned for a longer day than we actually had, it gave us a bit less than two hours to rest our feet at our Airbnb before going to dinner.
Dinner was at 📍Essencial. It’s a tiny restaurant that sits about 20 people and has an open kitchen. The place is bare bones with no demarcation between kitchen and dining room. The cooks will also take on the role of servers. Everything is boiled down to the essentials. The food and the flavours are, however, exquisite. It was, hands down, our best meal of the trip. With a single meal to go, they are likely to retain the crown. When asked about that day I’ll talk about the palace grounds and the castle but I will not forget to mention the food. I might actually start by mentioning it.