How to make sure you don’t get to the Pena Palace

We had so much fun with Richard and Lisa that we convinced them to stay one more day with us in Lisbon and take advantage of our third touring day with Lisbon Riders. And as they have never traveled with us before, they agreed, and now that they have gotten away from us into another Portuguese city, I am certain they are crafting their driving itinerary to maintain a 100km distance from us at all times.

Lisbon Riders does a standard tour to a lovely little town called Sintra, which was the playground for the Lisbon royalty. Lisbon Riders stops at two of the five grand residences that I wanted to see and I, without questioning who had better tour planning information – me in Tacoma with a Fodor’s guide book or Lisbon Riders on the ground in Portugal, devoted exclusively to sightseeing – decided that I needed to see all five.

This is probably a good point in the story to mention that Richard is a career medical person and that Richard and Lisa travel with an arsenal of emergency medical items. Any other paramedics that are out there and want to travel with us – please message me so we can set up a day with you as well.

Before we even left Lisbon, we required the assistance of Richard’s knowledge of the gastrointestinal system and associated medicinal offerings. Then, happily in the van, I questioned our new guide – Cat – about whether she had ever made it though all five sites in a day. (Answer, of course: No)

It’s crucial that you know that the showstopper…the biggie that you don’t want to miss is the Peña Palace, shown below. We had timed-entry tickets for 5pm.

Here’s our first impression of Sintra below. Later, because of my dubious routing choices, we got to “re-arrive” in Sintra and so our second impression of Sintra was this: vast and concerning amounts of foot and vehicle traffic, which Cat apologized for continuously, alternating only with her questions to Ron, in the back of the van, to make sure he didn’t have a head injury.

But we started our day here, at the National Palace of Sintra. It was built in two pieces – 15th century and then added onto in the early 16th century:

Here’s Cat and Lisa, haggling with the ticket seller, who sold us the “wrong” packet of tickets – an incomplete set. But Cat, who is a part time tour guide and a part time bankruptcy lawyer (!!), was right on it (except for the part where we were also being sold tickets to Convent of the Capuchin, actually closed for a single day strike protesting…I don’t know).

But into the Sintra Palace:

And in a bit of blog foreshadowing, here is Ron, NOT hitting his head on a tight passage:

From Sintra Palace, we moved on to The Quinta de Regaleira, a more recent 19th century Gothic mansion. It was built by a wealthy merchant to show off his varied architectural and ideological interests.

A key piece of the property is the whimsical gardens, including this well, that you’re supposed to climb through, exit across a water feature, and emerge reborn. (Report: we all exited but none felt reborn).

Here is the 45-minute line to get into that well and, to the extent that you feel reborn, I think it’s simply because you’re out of that line:

Our next stop was the Palace of Monserrate, a 19th century Moorish mansion. This was my favorite stop of the day. This place is gorgeous and might single-handedly dictate that I go to Morocco in 2023:

Here’s a couple of inside shots – the first is the hallway and the second is the library:

As much as I loved this house though, I think this is where things really went wrong. The problem, as I see it, was that Richard (actual medical knowledge) and I (only person who understands how often Ron walks into things AND only person who walks with a medical assistance stick that can double as a pointer) let Ron set off on a Moorish garden walk with a librarian (Lisa) and a bankruptcy attorney (Cat).

Inevitably, when Ron smacked his head into a low-hanging/decorative rock and hit the ground, Richard and I were lounging on the shady front porch, blissfully ignorant, and didn’t see the damage until we met up at the Lisbon Riders van. Here is Richard, ministering to Ron, strategically hidden behind that head rest to preserve a shred of his dignity:

Back in action at 3pm, we headed back to Sintra proper to see that Pena Palace. I should have been alarmed when it took us 45 minutes to move the 3.1 miles between the two buildings, but we were having car snacks and checking out Ron’s head so we were all busy. When we actually parked and approached the Palace though, we saw a line that was literally a kilometer long. One of the guards along the way said that these people, waiting in line at 4pm, were the people with the 2pm timed entry tickets.

In the end, after consulting with Lisa while we waited in a 25 minute line to buy a bottle of water, what we decided to do was to skip Pena Palace altogether…number one site in Sintra and maybe all of Portugal. And I have to admit, as we finally trudged away from the palace, Cat pointed out that the entry line…thousands of people long…had somehow disappeared as we waited in the water line.

Did we go inside? Nope. We were exhausted and headed back to Lisbon. But here’s another exterior shot for you:

In hindsight, I feel that what I planned as a day of architectural extravagance, could better be summed up as a lesson in the traffic flow of the various Sintra sites, coupled with further proof that Ron cannot walk a garden in the company of a librarian and bankruptcy attorney. I’ll leave you with two pictures. One is Cat, showing us a map of Sintra in the morning, perhaps hoping, hoping, hoping that I’d see the futility of my guiding route and then Ron, who approved this picture, good sport that he always is.