I woke up to my alarm with my back hurting a bit from the stiff mattress, but no time to dawdle – we have castles to see! I actually felt good – already fairly adjusted to Portugal time. They had a little expresso machine that took pods – kind of like k-cup, but little pods for espresso. That was all we had for coffee so I threw one of those in the machine and it made a cute little coffee. It was quite strong and bitter so I grabbed what I guessed was the sugar and dumped a load in to sweeten. I took one sip…and immediately walked over to the sink to spit it out. That was definitely salt, not sugar… I tried one more time using the brown sugar and it was much better.
I then woke up the family and gave my usual Dad cajoling to get them all moving since we had quite a few morning timed reservations. We got out the door mostly on schedule and I called an uber to pick us up. I was a little surprised that someone was assigned to us and picked us up within 10 minutes for like 10 euros. He dropped us off right in Sintra right in front of our first castle – Quinta da Regaleira.
We were actually a little early somehow, so we took a quick walk down the hill to the cute little town of Sintra to look for some breakfast. The girls are all a little grouchy when they are tried and hungry, but all bad attitude went away when we just randomly found their dream place – Starbucks! We grabbed some coffees and a few pastries and cookies, then walked back up the hill to Quinta da Regaleira.
I’ll be honest – I relied quite a bit on Chatgpt to plan this trip for me, so didn’t do my normal amount of research, so I really didn’t know what to expect for any of these places. I was at least smart enough to ask Chatgpt to tell me which locations needed reservations, but I wasn’t 100% sure that this castle thing we were in front of was Quinta da Regaleira, but we followed the crowds and guides that were all going one direction and found the line for the entrance. I moved fairly quickly and we were into the beautiful grounds and I do mean beautiful. The grounds were massive and beautiful with interesting architecture all along the way. You walk around steep cobble stone paths, but you spend most of the time gawking around at this building / tower or that plant and we just blindly wandered from place to place in general direction that other people were moving, taking pictures along the way.
One of the things I had heard mentioned a few times by the guides was some kind of Well. I didn’t really know what it was – some kind of magic well that you threw a coin down for good luck, but we randomly came upon a small lie of people that were waiting to go into an underground cave type thing with sign “Poco Iniciatico” or Initiatic Well. What we found inside blew our minds. It was a stone, columned spiral staircase that went down 9 levels deep into the ground occultists say the 9 levels represent the nine levels of Hell from Dante’s Infernos and we were symbolically walking down through hell. It was beautiful to me and I can’t even imagine how they built this beautiful place. It ends up dumping you into an underground tunnel system that eventually unloads you into a waterfall and back outside again.
After leaving the well, we had kind of an amazed rush through the rest of the grounds and walked back down because we were getting later and later for our next timed spot at Pena palace. Back when I booked this stuff, I booked Pena palace first before booking Quinta Regalia, and there were only morning spots open so there was really only an hour gap (10 am entry for Q.R. vs 11am at Pena palace) with only a 30 minute forgiveness period. By the time we we were leaving, it was already past 11am – I hope they are forgiving to tourists.
As we were leaving, the transport to Pena palace was another challenge. I had booked hop-on / hop-off bus tickets to get to Pena palace, and there was a bus stop right in front, so we thought that would work. There were some scammers at the exit that were trying to get us to pay big bucks for transport, but i’m no fool (and I already paid for the bus), so we wait. It turned out that I was a fool after all, because this wasn’t the bus stop that will bring you to Pena palace – it was for a different tourist bus loop that goes to other places. The bus driver told us to walk down hill to different spot instead. We walked downhill, but there are just no clear signs anywhere. After waiting for awhile longer at a different bus stop that also seemed like it wasn’t going to work out, I just ended up calling for an Uber, who asked us to walk up the hill for pickup to save us 30 minutes of time because everything was a one way windy road full of tourist traffic now that we’ve started to get to primetime. We walked up hill and waited another 20 minutes, but finally were picked up by the uber.
We finally arrived at Pena Palace at ~12:30 – a full hour after our forgiveness time, but the people working the entrance scanned us and waives us right through – success! After you get into the entrance, there’s another straight up hill 30 minute walk – unless you reserved the bus tickets that I wisely did, so we grabbed the bus to go uphill. That could have been a mistake since our bus driver somehow went the wrong way uphill and he had to back down a very steep grade, almost taking out some trees and tourists, but eventually got us there.
The castle is quite a sight – not really what you think of when you think of castles. It looks like it was built from several architectural styles mixed together – some medieval renaissance, some gothic, some Islamic and they threw whatever paint they had laying around on the outside – a little yellow here, a little red here. I think the king had some very peculiar tastes.
We were very hungry again by now, so walked up to the palace cafeteria to grab some lunch, which consisted of meet/cheese sandwiches, chips, drinks, and some almond filled pastry. I thought it was pretty good for tourist food, but the younger girls were “bleh” on everything but the chips. The view at the top where you eat is really the bonus. This palace is the highest point in the area, by a lot, so you can see for miles (sorry kilometers) all around, all the way to the ocean and every city in between.
After lunch, we walked blindly around for a bit taking in the views and the castle and came upon a long line for what we figured out was the Palace interior tour. This was the thing that was actually the timed entry that was on our ticket…and now we’re 3 full hours late for that… We got in line anyway and the people checking tickets looked at our tickets and almost gasped when they saw how late we were. We smiled and apologized and they told us to go ahead and get in line. We’re in!!! The interior was definitely the more impressive part of the palace to me. There were lots of beautiful art, ancient intricate furniture and mosaic wood and ceramic floors. I really liked to look at the ceiling in each of the rooms – they were all beautiful curved ceilings that I can’t fathom how they were designed and built, and still standing back in the days before we had the internet and modern building techniques.
We finished the palace tour with one more round of walking around the outside with the girls doing some tiktok danace videos in the same place that kings and queens used to do their morning stroll through the grounds. I’m very sure that they would have been executed if they were caught with those dance moves back in 1850.
We left on the same steep hill bus back down again and exited through the “Saida”. There were dozen people offering “tuk-tuk” rides, which is the Portuguese rick-shaw type motorcycle tourist vehicle, but since I had already paid for bus tickets, we found that wait point and hopped on and were dropped off back in Sintra. No vacation day is complete without a little bit of icecream, and we found a great Gelato spot close by and enjoyed 2 scoops in the shade and watched the hustle and bustle around us.
The family was fairly beat at this point, but I had one more item on my itinerary for today – Cabo da Roca. It’s on the coast, fairly close to our Airbnb, so we grabbed another uber and took the ~30 minute drive out west. It was another beautiful spot – actually the western most point of continental Europe – and we soaked in the steep cliffs above sea. Some crazy person actually walked all the way past the safety barriers climbed down to the bottom, then somehow up the very steep island at the bottom. If my brother Ryan was with us, I would have guessed it was him.
We were too tired for a fancy dinner, and stopped in a close-by restaurant and grabbed some hamburgers and the local beer (for me, not the girls). I feel like they always look at you a little sideways when you order hamburgers, but they put them on the menu. They were not bad at all.
Stuffed with burgers, we took one final uber back to the Airbnb and enjoyed the view out the window one more time before passing out way before bedtimes.