This trip to Portugal was for Jake’s biometric appointment, part of the long residency application process in Portugal. A few months ago, he got an email telling him to report to the office in Cascais at noon on Feb. 19. After a day’s delay due to thunderstorms in Dallas, we left Santa Fe before dawn on Feb. 15 and by mid-morning the next day, had arrived in Lisbon. Our one hour layover in Madrid required a race through the airport from customs in one terminal to a train ride to another terminal, back through security, and to the far end of that terminal, but we did make our flight. We rented a car at the airport, and without too much trouble found the public parking Jake had reserved in Cascais. We stayed at the lovely historic Pergola Boutique hotel, well located near the beach, restaurants, and the AIMA office.
Cascais is an upscale beach town about an hour by train from downtown Lisbon. We were there for four nights. The 17th was Jake’s birthday and a public holiday (Shrove Tuesday, the last day of Carnival). But as it was the only day we had the whole day free, we decided to drive to Sintra, about a half hour north of Cascais, and see some of the historic sites. It was a lovely drive up the coast and through the hills. We parked in the town of Sintra and had a nice lunch of fresh fish and octopus at a taberna. We strolled uphill to another part of town where tours to the nearby castles start. We bought a ticket for the public bus that took us partway up to Pena Palace. Many of the roads in Portugal were damaged by big storms just a few days before we arrived and some roads around Sintra were still closed. There were clearly marked walking paths through woods though that had been cleared of debris.
Pena Palace was built as a pleasure Palace in the 1800s. Sintra was and is a popular summer retreat area from the heat of Lisbon. We did the free audio tour which was quite informative. There were some interesting pieces of furniture and other decorations. From the palace, we walked downhill back into town, a few kilometers. On the way we stopped at a small café and had a delicious, very moist, carrot-cake like slice of dessert with an espresso pinguado for me – espresso mellowed with just a bit of milk.
Cascais has a small market, but it is only really active on Wednesdays and Saturdays. There is a fish restaurant there with a good reputation and some other permanent stalls. There are a couple little beaches, popular for swimming and playing on the sand. You can walk or bike a long ways along the coast. We walked up to Boca do Inferno, a wave-created series of caves along the coast. There are restaurants and cafes to stop for a coffee or snack all along the way.
On Wednesday we had an appointment to pick up documents at our broker’s office in Lisbon. We took the train and then an Uber to the office and chatted with a nice broker who had grown up in Cascais. We got some lunch at an Italian restaurant near the old town before catching the train back to Cascais.
Thursday was the appointment at AIMA. When you show up, they give you a number. There is a small indoor waiting room, but it was full so we joined other would be immigrants on the marble steps of a church on the square in front of the AIMA offices. Many people come with their lawyers. We almost missed our appointment because we didn’t hear our number called, but they let us in after the couple that had the next number. The wait was about 40 minutes. The staff person reviewed Jake’s paperwork, had him fill out a newer version of a form, and then photographed and fingerprinted him. Paperwork for that process done! That evening we had a celebratory tapas dinner at Taberna Clandestina with a pitcher of sangria. The food was really good and we had a fun chat with a Portuguese couple next to us. He is a real estate agent who was from Cascais. His wife was thrilled to learn that Jake shared an interest in snails (as food) and we learned that they are seasonal in Portugal. I have no idea why a land snail would be seasonal.
Our last day we visited a small museum that featured marquetry, it was quite impressive, but the marquetry material was straw rather than wood. The museum is in a fairly large public park nice for meandering. Beyond Cascais, we had no reservations or plans, so we spent some time considering where to go.
Our first stop was Setubal, on the coast just south of Lisbon. There’s a big seafood industry there. The town has a big central square and a very impressive public market. So many fish! So, we found a fish restaurant, Antonio’s, for lunch. Serendipitously, we sat next to two older gentlemen who were lunching who wanted to chat. It was a little hard to hear them in the busy restaurant, but we ended up chatting in a mixture of Portuguese, French and English. One of them had learned French because there were a lot of French immigrants who came to Setubal after WWII when a fish processing factory opened. The other spoke some English but was extremely soft-spoken. They encouraged us to try migas, a stuffing-like dish made with bread and olive oil. I got the pesce espada – it is a very long, narrow, flat, silvery fish I had seen in the market, and Jake got tuna. Both were grilled to perfection and served with boiled potatos and something like broccolini. Rather than continue town the coast, we opted to go inland to Evora, a walled city amid rolling hills covered in oak trees and grasslands.
Jake found the Templo hotel there in the old city and afterwards we parked the car outside the city walls in a free public parking area. We looked at the Roman ruin right in the center of the city and found a nice tapas and wine bar for dinner. The next morning we walked to the public park and small market before heading out. I wanted to see the neolithic cromlech just outside of town. There are actually a couple, but we went for the less touristy one. It was a stretch for our low slung rental car to make it down the 800m of very pitted and still muddy road, but we made it. The only other person there was a young woman meditating and her elderly dog. It was a peaceful spot among oaks and pasture for sheep and goats. We drove south for another couple hours along pretty roads stopping for a lunch of chicken stew at a wayside restaurant where everyone but us also enjoyed a pitcher of wine or sangria, and then in Beja to see the marble tower built in the 1300s and 1400s to stop a conquest of Portugal. The tower had some fun virtual reality videos of what life would have been like in different eras. The same area had been invaded by the Moors and the Visigoths at different times. After Beja, we rejoined the main north-south highway for another 40 minutes passing almond and citrus groves, until we reached Faro on the southern coast.
Any areas with beaches along the southern coast are very built up and less remains of older ruins because of an earthquake and tsunami in 1755. Faro sits a little inland along a river with barrier islands in front of it. There’s a train that runs up and down the coast and a small airport outside of Faro. It turned out there was a big bike race that weekend in town, so there wasn’t as much available for rooms. But we found sort of an Airbnb place that was nice enough, but faced a noisy pedestrian street. It took a fair amount of driving around to locate the place and the public parking about a 5 minute walk away. Maybe it was just because we were tired, but we just didn’t love Faro. It would have been interesting to take a boat out to the barrier islands though. We had dinner at a place where the chef was either French or Italian. He was very proud of his food and scoffed somewhat at the Portuguese way of cooking things. We really enjoyed the bowl of clams in a rich sauce.
From Faro, we opted to head west to Lagos. Lagos has really beautiful rock and cliff formations along its coast with small golden beaches. The town is developing rapidly, but still felt like a pleasant small town. There is an older part of town with some of the original city walls in place. We stayed at a place about a 20 minute walk from the old part of town and 10 minute walk to Ponte da Piedade. It had the best breakfast buffet of any place we stayed! Costa do Oiro. We had a leisurely lunch at a rooftop restaurant hotel (one of the few places that was open on Sunday for lunch) and then a sushi dinner in the old town.
The next morning we strolled around Lagos some more before heading north to Monchique in the mountains. This area has thermal waters, but the road to the hot springs seemed to be closed for repairs. We did stop in the lovely, hilly, town of Monchique for a traditional lunch of grilled, marinated pork neck and a slice of chocolate cake with lemon. This seemed like it would be great area for hiking, although many of the forests in the area burned less than a decade ago.
Our first attempt to get from Monchique to the Sines on the western coast was foiled by another closed road. Jake found us an alternate route that appeared to have been recently cleared of several small landslides that took us on a very curvy route to Aljezur, south of Sines. The west coast is not as developed, but is popular for surfing. We stopped to take in the waves at one point. By now it was late afternoon, so we skipped Sines and headed straight for Lisbon, returning the rental car and catching a shuttle to our airport hotel.
Back to Madrid at 8:30 am, and now on the flight to Dallas, glad that we are not stopping on the snowbound east coast this trip!
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