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.

Living

Nice thing about living in a small town: you get to know people. Not just my local cafe owner, but also the guy who wanders about smiling at everyone, his Tourettes manifesting itself in loud moans and groans and the occasional naughty word. Or the ancient fisherman with no front teeth who can't resist babies but never begs from their mothers (only from poor English teachers.) Or the tall dreadlocked Nigerian who wears a different traditional outfit every day and sells real Ray-Bans for €5. Bargain.

Cascais is a tourist town and has been since King Luís II first saw its crescent beaches in 1870 and decided it would be just fine for his annual summer vacation. But its native population (just 35,000) keeps a tight hold on its daily life - the fishermen still weave their nets on a secretive, rocky shore, the housewives still march about the streets chattering as loudly as they can, and the cafe air is still more full of Portuguese than English.

Long may it last.

Walking

Thought I'd take you on a walk today. This is the walk I take whenever I go into town. Hah - yeah, right! It's actually the route my bus into town takes, because who walks when there's a bus, right? But it is the walk I sometimes take when the weather's not too hot, as it's the quickest way to town, and the most beautiful.

First we're going to walk down the road from my flat towards the sea. This area used to be a part of the protected Sintra green belt. Then, because developers don't like to see a nice bit of land wasted, some fires mysteriously burnt all the indigenous flora, and the land was sold to be turned into hotels. It's a common story in Portugal - in this dry country, it's often easier to burn your rival's olive grove than to compete with his business. When I studied in Coimbra, there'd just been a fire that could be seen from space - the firemen (who are volunteers in Portugal) had given up on fighting it, and had just concentrated on saving the houses on the edge of Coimbra, and so everything beyond was a blackened desert.

But pass the hotels, and the most amazing view opens up to you.


Not the roundabout, obviously, but the sea beyond. At this point, the coast has risen from the beaches of Estoril to become crumbling cliffs and jagged caves, and it continues to rise until it reaches Cabo de Roca, the westernmost point of Europe, a 20-minute drive from here. We turn left towards town.


Lined on one side by blue-green sea, black rocks and the dry, indigenous vegetation, the other side of the road is where exiled royalty came to hang out during the European revolutions and post-WWII. The last Italian king spent his 37-year exile in one of the grand palaces hidden behind high walls, and the Brits are represented by Princess Di, who, like Rei Umberto of Italy, had a road named after her. Following the path towards town takes us into a shallow dip, where walkers are shielded from the traffic by trees. The sound suddenly drops away, as if you'd stuffed your ears with cotton wool, and all that can be heard is the boats on the water if the wind is right, or the plop of a fisherman's line as he casts off from the rocks beneath.


A few steps down the road, the silence is forgotten as Boca do Inferno, the Mouth of Hell, thunders into view. A deep chasm in the cliff, where the sea froths its way through a narrow opening, this is partly famous for being the site of an English occultist magician's faked death in 1930. Aleister Crowley was a rather unpleasant man, and his stay in Portugal after being kicked out of Mussolini's Italy is not widely celebrated by the Catholic-minded Portuguese. His "suicide" was assisted by one of Portugal's best-known poets, Fernando Pessoa, and Boca do Inferno became a bit of a pilgrimage spot for all of a fortnight, before Crowley rocked up again in Berlin.


The day I took these photos the Boca was tame, although still noisy, echoing off the rocks; in the fiery build-up to storms, the plumes of spray can be seen from the town centre.

Onwards from the Boca. Just before a narrow bridge, on the right, is an old manor house, Casa de Santa Maria, a beautiful ramble of shuttered windows and tiny towers, overlooking the marina. It neighbours a lighthouse, typically Portuguese in its blue and white tiles.

From Santa Maria, we cross the bridge to the marina and the castle. From the road, all that's visible over the fortified walls is a couple of cranes and some mysterious iron rods - something is being built or renovated or destroyed inside. Although the castle is owned by the council, it's not often open to the public. A friend tells me that sometimes they use it for classical concerts in the summer, but she's never gone; I'm definitely putting it on my list of things to do when they next plan one.


As we turn round the corner of the sprawling castle, the Baia opens up before us. Little brightly-painted fishing boats bob like apples, contrasting with a few sleek and enormous yachts, anchored just off a small curve of beach.


The fishermen store their equipment on a ledge below the promenade, watched over by a statue known as the Jolly King - a bronze statue of King Carlos the Diplomat, the last "real" king of Portugal, who loved the sea and spent many summers in Cascais. He's caught in the act of gazing over the Baia from a ship deck, telescope in hand.


Turning left at the Jolly King, the promenade drops down to sea level, a palm-lined road popular on weekends, when there's often a festival and Santini's, the venerable purveyors of ice cream to royalty for decades, has a stall by the mermaid statue (which you can just see behind the palm tree).


The road slips down to meet what would perhaps be called the Town Square, were it not so tiny; it contains the Town Hall, decorated with tiled portraits of the saints Pedro and Paulo.


We're two minutes from my school here, and so this is where we'll stop, on the bench where I often sit and have lunch or an ice cream, scoffing at the bright red tourists and envying the browned locals, keeping an eye on the fishermen's boats for them, until they come in the late afternoon with their nets and traps.

It's a hard life...