Sightseeing

Belem is a few stops from me on the Lisboa-Cascais railway. At the mouth of the Tagus, it's traditionally the place from which the conquistadors and explorers were seen off, and, mostly, welcomed home to Portugal. It's littered with enormous phallic monuments to people like da Gama and Dias, heroes in their own nation, vandals and homicidal enslavers in other, more southern, nations. One man's meat...

There used to be a little hermitage here, where da Gama spent the night before sailing on his epic journey to India at the end of the 15th century. When he returned, flush with success, the king ordered a vast and impressive monastery to be built on the ruins of the hermitage - Mosteiro dos Jerónimos, arguably the vastest and most impressive monastery in Portugal.

Although the squandering of piles of money on a religious statement is not to my taste, the monastery is admittedly very pretty, and as a bonus, inside are buried, side by side, two of Portugal's notables. One is da Gama, who, as I've said, had a lasting effect on my own home region. The other, more culturally fascinating, is Luís da Camões, the 16th century author and poet, half-blind soldier, traveller, romantic. In a shipwreck off Cambodia, his Chinese lover was drowned, but he managed to swim to shore holding aloft his precious manuscript for one of Portugal's classics - the Lusiads. Scandals ensued after his love affairs with princesses and queens, and he was imprisoned several times for debt and fights. He dropped out of the University of Coimbra - hence the statue I had to pass every day while studying there. Fascinating guy...

















Also in Belem, and along the sam colonial lines, is the Monument of Discovery, an enormous structure leaning out over the Tagus, Vasco da Gama leading the conquistadors into regions unknown, spreading Portugal's influence and briefly making it one of the wealthiest empires in the world.


All very impressive.

More interesting, perhaps, is the living, modern city of Lisbon. One of the must-do activities in Lisbon is a ride on the old trams, so Dad and I made our way to a small square where one of the trams begins its perilous ascent to the castle. There was a queue. A long queue. Apparently, everyone else reads Lonely Planet too. The last time I was in Lisbon, it was the depths of winter and the tourists had gone to warmer climes - my friends and I travelled all day on empty trams, chatting to the conductors and hanging off the back rails. One tram came and went, filled to the brim with camera-wielding behatted Europeans; the next came with a twin. Dad and I got on the first one, and managed to nab the last two seats by a window. Luckily for us, this driver decided he wasn't there to be nice, and closed the doors to the other 30 people in the queue; the tram behind us didn't take any passengers at all, but just drove by! Lucky us :)


The No 28 tram wends its way through narrow streets, past Graça and its little olive tree-lined squares, up to the summit where the castle sprawls, and then down again past the teeming alleys of Alfama.


The Castello de São Jorge is another Moorish bequest, as is Alfama, where tiny houses are filled by tight communities - and have been since the time of the Romans. During Moorish times, it constituted the entire city, and it's the only place in Lisbon to survive the great 1755 earthquake.
















After a day's wandering, including an unplanned trip out to a mall on the edges of the city for a CD Dad wanted, we were exhausted, and headed back to Cascais for dinner and coffee. I took Dad to Flecha Azul, the friendly cafe next door to my school, where we sat outside enjoying the evening cool. A familiar, older man emerged from the cafe to smoke a cigarette (and by the way, I'm astounded by how well the Portuguese have taken to being told not to smoke indoors - the last time I was here, there were ashtrays outside shops in enclosed malls, and the Portuguese were making full use of them!) The man, who was familiar in the way that many faces are becoming familiar to me in little Cascais, started chatting to us and turned out to be an English retiree who's lived in Portugal for 10 years (although in time-honoured English tradition, he speaks almost no Portuguese!) He was a fascinating find: in Cascais, most retirees are conservative, upper-middle class bridge players, but he was working class and liberal. Finding out we were Zimbabwean, he self-deprecatingly said he knew nothing about it, but then turned out, as so often, to know quite a lot. He told us of a story that did the rounds in the 70s: apparently, when Joshua Nkomo went to England for the first time, it was traditional for the Queen to pick up visiting dignitaries from Victoria Station in her coach, it being just round the corner from the Palace. Feeling slightly awkward, the pair were sitting in the coach making stilted conversation, when one of the horses lifted its tail and noisily let out some air. At which the Queen murmured "Oh, do pardon me!"

"Oh, no problem, your majesty," says our forgiving Nkomo, "I thought it was the horse..."

Oh, British humour!

Visiting

I want you to turn away from the computer and go to your childhood bookshelf. The one stuffed with all the big fairybooks and broken-spined Grimm's collections. Are you there? Find a fairy tale and open it to the picture of the castle. The one with the princess in the turret and the ogre in the dungeon. Pretty isn't it?

That's where I was on Friday.

On Thursday my Dad arrived from England, which was very exciting, and even more so when my big meeting-up plan worked like a dream, and I didn't have to run around Lisbon desperately looking for him.

The next morning I looked out of my window at the Serra de Sintra and, not seeing any clouds, hustled down to Dad's hotel and onto a bus bound for Sintra Village. Although I can see it from my window, it's still a 40 minute bus ride from Cascais. Perched high in a forested national park, Sintra used to be the big town, and Cascais the fishing village. These days Sintra is the preserve of the rich and famous and daytrippers from Lisbon, and when I say these days, I'm talking about right back to Lord Byron's time; in fact, Byron called it his Glorious Eden and used it in his poem Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, while Hans Christian Andersen merely considered it the most beautiful place in Portugal. Several English notables ended up here, some for more noble reasons than others, and some of them made their marks in beautiful palaces and landscaped English gardens.

We rode the bus through suburbs and villages, climbing the landscape, until the castle I can see from my bedroom window as a grey sliver in the distance was more looming than slivering, then we got off. Unfortunately a couple of stops early, so we had to walk through the lower town for a short bit, but we fortified ourselves with a Portuguese brunch - coffee and pasteis de nata.


Heading onwards past deep valleys and tiny roadside shrines, we turned a corner and were suddenly in Sintra Vila proper, the National Palace before us, chestnut sellers on the corner. We equipped ourselves with a map and a paper bag of roasted chestnuts, and sat in a deserted corner, a treed courtyard with a bench overlooking the valley. We decided to see the castle, and we decided to walk up to it - I swear Dad had all the information at his disposal when he decided that!

It was a hard work, but we took it slowly. It wound up a steep mountainside for 700m, first through tiny houses (one was lived in by Hans Christian Andersen once) and churches, then through forest. The forest floor was dotted with great big slabs of rock which seemed unnaturally shaped and placed. A couple had definitely been hollowed out a bit - perhaps to supply a suitably uncomfortable place for a hermit to live out his life. Soon we started seeing more definite signs of life with thick defence walls and a ruined church.


The path became wider and more defined.

I climbed an interesting little tower to look down on the ruin, and only realised after scrambling down the narrow steps again that there was a skull-and-bones on the base - it was an ossuary for the bones from the church's crypt.

Finally we reached the main wall of the castle. The Moors conquered Iberia in the 8th century, and their final defeat in Portugal by Christian Portuguese in 1249 coincided with the establishment of Portugal as an independent nation. In Southern Portugal, they left behind some beautiful architecture and buildings, and some important names - Lisbon (Al-Ushbuna), Coimbra (Kulimriyya), Beja (Baja - where I lived as a student), the Algarve (al-Gharb) and the beautiful area we're now exploring - Sintra. The Moorish influence continued long after the last were expelled from Portugal and Spain in the centuries following their defeat. Portuguese people took up their paintbrushes and created some of the most beautiful pieces of pottery I've ever seen, with intricate patterns and convoluted stories. The Moorish Fountain is an early 20th century example in Sintra.

This is no pretty but fundamentally pointless folly, though - it remains a water source for local people to this day. We passed another fountain further up the hill, also built above a natural spring, where groups of older people were cheerfully ignoring the municipal sign restricting them to 2 litres a day, filling five or ten 5-litre bottles each, and loading them back onto their waiting bakkies...

Anyway, as I was saying: we'd just reached the top of the hill, where the Moorish castle sits like a natural eruption of pale stone. Less menacing than it perhaps would have been were the hill still deforested to the base, as I'm sure it would have been once. The forest has taken back its territory, and is thick even inside the walls - fairly useless if you wanted to see your enemies coming from far off! The fort - for that's really what it is - looks remarkably well-preserved for something built more than a thousand years ago, and which has been through a number of wars and nation-shattering earthquakes. And this is because it's not well-preserved, but rather well-renovated. Much of the lower walls and floors, and the amazing cistern have survived from the first occupants, though. Even the outdoor granaries are still there - despite having been converted to rubbish tips by the subsequent Christian occupants.


The view from the crenellated walls is astounding - villages on the coast, half a day's hard ride for 8th century warriors, are clearly visible. Sintra Village is just beneath - although if you bear in mind that we actually walked up to the Village, and only then up to the Castle, I'm pretty sure you're bloody impressed with us right now. If you're not, you should be.

Dotted throughout the forest were dozens of sprawling mansions, every one of them sprouting turrets and lace like a set designer had just learned the Grimm Brothers were coming to see the play tonight and were expecting perfection, thank you very much.


From one of the towers, the fanciful palace on the next hill is clear in its pink and yellow glory - Pena Palace, a 19th century pure embodiment of romanticism built over the ruins of a medieval monastery.

Sadly, after all our effort, we didn't feel up to battling the tourists for a closer glimpse, and when we left, it was straight onto a bus, which teetered its way down the hills to the bus station. And when I say teetered, I actually mean "perilously crashed" - Dad thought it might be a source of pride amongst the bus drivers as to who terrifies more tourists on each shift... From there we caught another bus back to Cascais, along the beautiful western coast.

Bedtime arrived early that night.