Specialty shops throughout Portugal sell Port wine at inflated prices. Often, the same bottle can be bought in Canada for much less. The exception in Sintra is the Adega das Caves, a restaurant serving delicious, traditional Portuguese food at reasonable prices in a converted wine cellar. They also sell Port, vintage and recent, by the [...]

Geographically, Sintra is small, but it holds enough attractions to make a two- or three-day stay worthwhile. We spent three days exploring the town, staying at the basic, but comfortable, Casa de Hspedes Adelaide near the cmara municipal (city hall). Accommodations in the area are plentiful, ranging from a youth hostel to deluxe hotels, with [...]

Back in Sintra, the visual delights continued. The Palcio Real, or National Palace, is most prominent, with its white, conical bullhorns ("ice cream tops", as my wife dubbed them) towering over the village. The palace offers guided tours of its decoratively diverse rooms. Sintra is divided in two by a park, requiring a scenic (but [...]

Unlike most European castles, this one is fully furnished in its original opulence, with extensive descriptions of each room. The rooms are an eclectic mix of themes, from Persian Renaissance to the Baroque. After touring the palace for a couple of hours, we descended the same path we had come. Halfway down the hill, at [...]

Contrary to appearances, this was far from Tolkein’s world, though he could easily have taken his inspiration here. We were at the Palcio Nacional da Pena, high above the town of Sintra, and about twenty miles northwest of Lisbon. The palace, which dates from the middle nineteenth century, was commissioned by a transplanted Bavarian prince [...]

The path was more difficult than I had imagined, though the guidebook had warned about it. We hiked steeply and steadily, sometimes losing the trail to wisps of low cloud, under the wet cover of lush greenery. Though it was not hot, I was dripping with sweat, and understood why so many opted to take [...]