Sintra

After visiting the National Palace in the centre of Sintra, we took a taxi (there‘s also a bus service) to the Palácio da Pena (approximately 5 km out of town). We had only our old guidebooks with us with ugly black and white photos, so we weren´t prepared for what we saw: we bought tickets in a booth beside the street (4 Euro/concession 2 Euro [three years ago]), came into a park where an odd vehicle was waiting, a kind of mini train in which one could ride up the steep mountain if one didn‘t want to walk (1 Euro), we took it and when we had climbed up we saw the kitschiest castle ever! An irregular building with grey, pink and yellow walls and parapets, sugar-baker style ornaments everywhere, onion shaped yellow tops on the towers, pinnacles galore, a drawbridge, Disneyland come alive in Portugal!

‘Kitsch‘ is a German word. Why am I telling you this? Well, the building as we see it today was thought up by Queen Maria II‘s consort, the German (!) Ferdinand Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, aided and abetted by a German (!) architect, Baron Eschwege, they recreated a medieval castle in the middle of the 19th century, someone called the outcome a ‘Wagnerian monstrosity‘, for me the whole thing was so kitschy that I liked it.

The rooms on the upper floor look as if the royal family may come back any minute, they‘re complete with furniture, crockery and cutlery on the tables, soap and towel beside the bathtub, emroidery in tambour frames, pictures on the walls; Ive never seen anything like that.

The Parque de Pena is one of the largest and loveliest parks in Europe, the Monserrate Gardens nearby are fascinating for botanists, they were laid out by the Englishman Francis Cook, also in the 19th century and contain over 3000 species of plants.

No wonder that for Lord Byron Sintra was ‘Glorious Eden‘! (The Portuguese have forgiven him that he called Lisbon shabby).