Ohhh, Por-tu-gal'!, Part 3

Lisboa, Sintra & Evora in the Rain, Rain, Rain!

Feb 28, 2025

Lisboa is wonderful: iconically European, full of character, cobblestone, and Western history. Boasting Moorish fortresses and Gothic/Romantic castles atop every hillside. Offering delicious tapas and sweet custard tarts (pasteis de nata) twice or five times on every block. With the graceful Tagus “River running through it”, from where 15th and 16th-century Portuguese navigators set sail to East Asia, Africa, and the New World.

Hard to capture in words alone.

We’ve been graced with three days of sun before the daily winter rains fall from Portuguese Heaven, so we’ve walked our soles off day and night. From the Alfama, where we’re staying amidst its cobblestoned and historic old-world charm, through neighborhoods with names like Chiado and Bairro Alto, both very expat and bohemian-friendly with their stylish shops, bars, and restaurants, through Baixa and Rossio displaying their classy downtown central landmarks, to the Cais Do Sodré neighborhood with its pastel-painted buildings, acrobatic street performers, and more bars and trendy nightlife than need be in winter.

Can I correctly pronounce a single one of these Portuguese neighborhood appellations? No way in hell!

Somehow tearing ourselves away from the omnipresent and soul-searing fado music in the Alfama, we’ve also managed to squeeze in the Number 28 yellow trolley up to one of Lisboa’s most beautiful miradouros (viewpoints), and to the National Tile Museum (Museu Nacional do Azulejo), which was “the one” museum recommended to us most highly by our new “American-Santa Fe friends”, who have just repatriated to Lisbon since the November, 2024 election.

We also take a special trip to the small maritime town and harbor of Belem, about a thirty-minute public bus ride north of downtown Lisbon, because it’s from Belem that Vasco da Gama and his fellow Portuguese explorers set sail to discover India, Africa, and South America.

Although it’s a well-known tourist destination, Belem is well worth it for a history student like me who, as a kid, was infatuated with the great European navigators and conquistadoras, long before they were discredited and trashed by historians in the post-modern, post-Columbian period. Here, in Belem, are the kings’ and queens’ royal places, now turned into maritime museums surrounded by parques, plaques, and the most famous and delicious hot pasteis de nata in all of Portugal.

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Back in 2010, Surya and I made another trip, this time to Istanbul, Turkey. It was equally wonderful, immersing ourselves in a different and exotic world completely foreign to us. It was after a two-month Fulbright theater grant I was given in Bucharest, Romania, after which I flew directly to Istanbul, on a quest to discover the melting pot between “East and West”, the exact meeting point between Occidental and Oriental culture. Onion-dome Eastern Orthodox churches, palaces of the powerful sultans of the Ottoman Empire, Turkish-style hot tubs with grape leaf beatings by near-naked brutes looking like Oddjob from the James Bond and 007 “Goldfinger” film of 1964.

We got an Airbnb right in the heart of the old city (always a good idea), and spent a colorful, comfortable, and exotic three days walking the old streets, sailing the Bosporus (connecting the Black Sea to the Sea of Marmara and forming one of the continental boundaries between Asia and Europe), and feeling entirely welcome by the local Istanbulians.

But.. but… then… surrounded and solicited by an endless gang of local touts, all trying to convince us to leave Istanbul to “see the rest of exotic and spectacular Toorkee”, we eventually succumbed to the seduction and got on a group bus tour - for about a week. It was indeed beautiful and edifying, while at the same time, it was also grueling and monotonous, having to hop on and off the bus upon command, surrendering both our independence and curiosity to someone else’s discretion. Although we did indeed see once-in-a-lifetime sites like the Roman ruins in Ephesus, the crystal white calcite-carved mineral hot spring waters in Pamukkale, and best of all, taking a hot air balloon high above the wind-sculpted “fairy chimneys” of Cappadocia, we did both swear

We’ll never do that again.

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But… but… now… here we are, still in Lisboa, when the Portuguese Heavens start to open.

Besides,

there’s so much to see in the rest of Portugal!

So… so… we get on a Sunday morning train, a non-stop from Rossio Station in mid-Lisbon, and 50 minutes later, we are in… Sintra, the most western town in all of Europe. An area occupied by humans since the Early Stone Age, then by the Celts, who named the town “cynthia” (a moon symbol in Celtic mythology) soon after the era of Christ, and then by the Romans until the Fall of the Empire at the end of the 5th century, when Sintra was then occupied by the vandal Visigoths until the Umayyad Moors from Arabia conquered all of Iberia in the early 8th century.

You probably know how much I love history, especially the rise and fall of empires, so it was very surprising to learn that Portugal’s first king, Alfonso, repelled the Moors from Western Iberia in 1157, establishing the first independent kingdom of Portugal, over 300 years before Ferdinand and Isabella won the decisive battle at Granada in 1492, after which they “kicked out” all Muslims (and Sephardic Jews) from Spain.

But today, as I said, it’s pouring buckets of rain on Sintra, and therefore, necessarily, on us as well. And just as our train arrives at the station, our “walking tour” is canceled.

By text.

We’re very sorry but because of the severe weather conditions, your walking tour today has been cancelled. You will receive a full refund. (of 2.64 Euros).

That’s exactly where Pedro comes in.

Pedro is Sintra’s most famous tuk tuk driver. Electric tuk tuk, that is, not like the foot-pedaled tuk tuks in Asia.

Fortuitously, today, Pedro is the only tour guide and tuk tuk driver at the Sintra train station, while we, also by chance, are the only non-locals who have been stupid or brave enough to arrive in Sintra in the rain. Another match made in Portuguese Heaven.

We scrutinize each other.

Sixty Euro, says Pedro.
Forty, I reply. Man, we both know we’re your only possible customers today.
I see you’re a businessman like I am.

We spend the next twenty minutes under two red umbrellas negotiating a fee: a New York City ex-taxi-driving Jew and a clever Portuguese local tuk tuk driver from Sintra.

We settle on 40 Euros, but…. if the tour is as good as Pedro promises, it will be 50.

Easy, right? Why can’t they do just this in Gaza or the Ukraine?

The tour is great.

Sintra is a town of ancient forts, palaces, and monasteries. The oldest is the Moorish fort built right into the ragged mountainside, overlooking the Atlantic Ocean.

Here it is - in the foggy rain, looking a lot like King Arthur’s and Morgan’s le Fay’s “Mists of Avalon”.

Pedro takes us here and all around the town,. He finds my dropped iPhone and never stops his informed commentary.

Next… to the Pena Castle.

The history of this magical site reaches back to the 12^th century, when a chapel was first dedicated to Our Lady of Pena. Not long afterward, King Manuel I ordered the construction of a Monastery, the Royal Monastery of Our Lady of Pena. When the Lisbon earthquake struck in 1755, it left the monastery almost entirely in ruins. However, even while stricken, the Monastery remained active, until when, almost a century later, in 1834, following the abolition of religious orders in Portugal, it was abandoned.

Two years later, in 1836, the Portuguese Queen Maria II married Ferdinand of Saxe-Coburg, a prince in the noble household, and according to the nuptial contract, Ferdinand was bestowed with the status of king-consort.

Ferdinand II was one of the most cultured men of 19^th century Portugal and Europe. A polyglot, he spoke German, Hungarian, French, English, Spanish, Italian and of course, Portuguese. In his childhood, he received a thorough education in which the arts, especially music and drawing, were entirely cultivated. Over his entire lifetime, he maintained a deep connection with the arts whether as an artist, collector, or sponsor, thereby becoming known nationally as the “Artist-King”.

Shortly after his arrival in Portugal, he acquired, from his own personal fortune, the Monastery of Pena, then still in ruins, as well as all the lands surrounding the property. The 16th-century monastery held an enormous fascination for the King, stemming both from his Germanic education and his romantic imagination. While his original project was simply to restore the building as the summer residence for the royal family, his enthusiasm led him to the construction of a royal palace including ornate Romantic details such as winding parapet paths, lookout towers, an access tunnel, and even a moat and drawbridge. The palace incorporates architectural references displaying Manueline and Moorish influences that produce a surprising scenario recollecting “A Thousand and One Arabian Nights”.

At the end of two hours, not only does the effusive and erudite Pedro earn his 10 Euro tuk tuk bonus which we negotiated at the train station, but I crumble in kindness and gratitude and give him – the full 60 Euro which he originally asked for. Pussy Trules.

The next day, we break our Istanbulian promise to ourselves to “never leave another capital to rush around the entire country in a week”, and somewhat reluctantly, we leave Lisboa to… “hit the road”.

But not by tour bus this time. Rather by… rental car.

Much better, more comfortable and convenient… and perhaps not even a break of our Turkish vow. Technically speaking. Right?

However, the minute we hit the toll road out of Lisbon towards our first stop of the week, the old Moorish town of Evora, only about three hours due east, just as we drive over the Tagus River bridge, the Iberian Heavens decide to punish us with a deluge of rain.

The car seems to slide every time we change lanes. Makes me very nervous.

We switch drivers. Steadfast and impervious Surya takes over at the wheel, as I move to the passenger seat, hooking up the car’s Bluetooth player to my iPhone, looking out the windows teeming with rain, happily listening to my fado music mix, full of sweet and beautiful saudade.

But hey,

I guess it’s more than time to wrap up.

Just know that we get completely soaked in Evora, as sometimes one must, improvising a tour of a foreign country. We stay in a beautiful UNESCO-restored apartment, of course within the inner city’s stone walls, where also, of course, there is no tourist parking.

Resulting in… more soaking.

Surya stays in the rest of the day and night, while I go out in the rain.