Long and interesting day. Our destination today was Sintra, one of the most popular tourist destinations in Portugal. It’s a beautiful old city built around a set of small mountains… on the side of the mountains are perched some castles.. some of them very old.. and some not so old.. the main one we chose to visit was oen of the ‘not so olds’.. in fact it was created in the early part of the 20th century. the Palace of Quinta da Regaleira was built by Carvalho Monteiro who commissioned an Italian set designer ..a nd artisans from around the world to build a fairy tale like castle and grounds. It’s got lots of crazy themes from old Portugal, the Masons, the Knights Templar.. and I have to believe pre-channeling Walt Disney. It was a hoot. there were secret gardens, waterfalls, small storybook castles with turrets. even an ‘upside down” tower that went deep into the mountain.
we took a walk through a long set of tunnels underground.. it was dark and wet.. and had very cool ponds and waterfalls
We were getting hungry soe we walked down to the town and met up with Sam’manthas freind Amanda. THey’d been roommates at UCLA. Now Amanda is living in Lisbon .. She was elly nice and spoke portuguese, french and german.. We foudn a nice tapas place and Amanda helped us order in Portuguese.
After dinner we walked thoguh the back parts of town back past our car and to a little place that had an occult store.. it was in a beautiful old bar with a wonderful courtyard.
From their we drove back an hour or so to Ericera. Gabe and I needed to burn off soem energy so we went for a run along the cliffs at sunset..
quite a day.. more tomorrow !
nite all. nite sam
-me