A mountain castle, a mountain town and a beach resort

We spent our whole day today with our tour guide, Adelino Jorge. He told us to call him “Mr. George.” He is a very gregarious tour guide with a wealth of knowledge about our main destinations — Pena Palace, the mountain town of Sintra and the beach town of Cascais.

The first thing you notice when stepping out of the car in the palace parking lot is how cool and lush it is. It just smells green, if that makes any sense. The Portugal nobility used Sintra as their summer retreat, and it’s easy to see why.

The older Royal palace is in the town of Sintra, while Pena Palace started out life as a mountaintop monastery. The monastery was severely damaged in the 1755 earthquake that devastated all of Lisbon. It escaped the tsunami and fires, but the quake did plenty of damage. In 1840, new-ish King Fernando came along and saw potential in the partially destroyed monastery. He rebuilt it, embellished it and added a palace to it.

Fernando was born a prince of Germany in Vienna. He became a Portuguese king when his wife, Queen Maria II of Portugal, gave birth to a male heir. He was related to the same king who designed the very whimsical, fairytale castle Neuschwanstein in Bavaria. It runs in families, I guess, because Fernando went a little crazy with the renovations of Pena Palace, using every architectural style he knew — Moorish, Rococo, Romantic, Gothic — you name it, he used it.

The red portion in the photo below was the rebuilt monastery, which by the way was not originally red. The monks had the more humble gray stone all over. Why Fernando thought it should be red, I don’t know.

When this was a monastery, this tower had a church bell. King Fernando made it into a clock tower.

Here are a few other design elements he threw in:

Moorish keyhole arch entry way:

Portuguese tile work:

A shell grotto:

Ostentatious chandeliers:

A “Stag Room” so named not for bachelor parties, but for its decor:

The guy was really into over designing.

Here is the more modest yet still spacious kitchen, which now leads out into a rooftop cafe:

We also noticed that the palace is still in a restoration phase. This room’s walls and ceilings were recently cleaned and repaired. The furnishings were still covered, and we noticed workers on scaffolds just outside the windows. Did I mention this was on a mountaintop? In the background behind the scaffold with a person on it is nothing but sky and a distant view of the Atlantic Ocean.

Here are other restorers working in a safer place:

Our tour guide for the day, Mr. Jorge, seemed to know and be loved by every tour guide and museum employee we came across:

And I didn’t photograph nearly half of these warm interactions. He’s so friendly and everyone adores him!

Next, we visited the lovely town of Sintra, just at the base of the hill from the Pena Palace.

We chatted with a retired tourist information person who said he still visits Sintra every Monday to chat up the tourists and practice his languages. In addition to his home language of Portuguese, he also speaks English, French, Spanish, Italian and a little German. Here, he was showing us his German vocab list:

Next, Mr. Jorge took us to Cabo da Roca, the westernmost point in Europe. It is marked with a tower and cross.

The next land past this rock is New York City, according to Mr. Jorge.

As you may imagine, it was quite windy on the edge of the Atlantic Ocean. I was afraid of having a wardrobe malfunction.

Here are other views of the ocean as we drove toward the beach town of Cascais where we would have lunch.

Upon arriving in Cascais, we were starving and very ready for lunch. We chose the Mariscaria restaurant. The menu looked good, except for maybe this option:

I did not order barnacles and instead had the grilled sea bass.

Cascais is a resort town near Lisbon. The Portuguese nobility vacationed here in the late 1800s. It’s still a popular destination for Lisbon residents, with a direct train from Lisbon to downtown Cascais. We also heard many foreign accents, especially British. It’s a fun resort town for sure:

By the time we finished lunch and walked around a bit, it was 3:30. Mr. Jorge started us back to Lisbon. Upon returning to our hotel, I had a little rest and blog session while Will took a long walk.

Dinner tonight was a casual meal at a place recommended by Rick Steves. We wanted something low key and off the beaten path. I noticed several other customers were also tourists, but it was still very authentic. The menu was hand written in Portuguese and the owner spoke only a little English. We liked what we ordered — Will had some kind of stewed goat and I had the local cod fritter specialty. It was quite good.

All in all, a fun day.