Day 14: Sintra!

Our latest day sleeping in yet.

We slept until 9:15 and barely made it in time for breakfast. This felt scandalously late compared to the rest of the trip, even though it is probably still a respectable vacation wake-up time for normal people.

The first item on the docket was getting rid of our rental car. We did not want to deal with parking in Sintra, and we definitely did not want to deal with returning it at the airport, so we dropped it off first thing in the morning.

Goodbye, tiny car. You served us well. You also made several hills feel more dramatic than they probably needed to be.

From there, we got an Uber to Sintra city center. That turned out to be the wrong place to go, but our driver seemed to know what we were actually looking for and helped point us in the right direction.

We walked around Sintra for a bit, then bought a bus ticket to check out the attractions. It is amazing that buses are able to drive on those roads. They are crazy steep, crazy tight, and somehow still full of buses, cars, tuk-tuks, and pedestrians all acting like this is normal.

The bus dropped us off about an 11-minute walk from our first stop. That does not sound too bad until you realize it is an 11-minute walk on steep cobblestone, and we were still sore from hiking down to Praia da Ursa the day before.

Our first real stop was Quinta da Regaleira, which is a palace estate with gardens, caves, towers, tunnels, and the famous Initiation Well. It has ties to Freemasonry, Templar symbolism, and a lot of other mysterious-looking stuff that makes the whole place feel like someone designed a palace for a secret society and then decided to let tourists wander around it.

It was a little hard to get around at first. At one point, we found a well and could see people standing at the bottom.

“How do we get down there?”

That became the question for a while.

Eventually, we found the entrance to the cave network, and once we did, it was pretty cool. For the most part, we were just following people in a big line, which took away some of the mystery, but then Kaylea found a tunnel that shot off to the right.

It looked like it was closed off about 10 yards down, so Aaron said, “Nah.”

Kaylea said, “Let’s go anyway.”

Sure enough, there was a sharp left turn before the cones, and all of a sudden we were the ones standing at the bottom of the well we had been trying to reach. Kaylea was right. Aaron will be hearing about this forever.

We made it through the rest of the caves, then kept hiking farther downhill. Suddenly we were at another cave entrance with no line and no lighting. We went in, and Kaylea got sketched out pretty fast. It was nightmare fuel. Some other tourists came up toward us from the dark, so we knew there was another way out, but that did not make it any less creepy.

After Quinta da Regaleira, we stopped at a cafe for a quick snack, and the server gave us directions to our next attraction: the Castle of the Moors.

This was another castle that made our top ten. The Castle of the Moors sits high in the Sintra hills, with huge stone walls running across the ridge. It was originally built during the Moorish period, and from the walls you can see Sintra, the surrounding hills, the Atlantic, and the Pena Palace off in the distance.

It also involved more stairs, because apparently Portugal was not done with our legs yet.

The castle itself was incredible. Huge walls. Huge views. The kind of place where you understand immediately why someone would build a fortress there. It feels defensive, dramatic, and slightly irresponsible to walk around if you are afraid of heights.

We climbed around for a while, took in the views, and appreciated that this was a very different kind of castle from the palaces and estates we had been seeing. Less ornate rooms and more “try invading this hill and see what happens.”

W

After that, we Ubered back to Cascais and took a pretty long nap, which is rare for Aaron. That should tell you where we were physically at this point in the trip.

When we woke up, we went to a store to grab snacks for the plane ride home. It was our last full day in Portugal, so the mood was somewhere between “we should enjoy every minute” and “we are very tired and need airplane snacks.”

Then, because Cascais apparently wanted to make sure we remembered the soundtrack from the night before, day two of the rock concert started around 9 p.m. right outside our hotel room. We still were not totally sure what the occasion was, but it was loud enough to become part of the evening whether we had chosen it or not.

For dinner, we got ramen. It was not Portuguese, but it was warm, easy, and exactly what we wanted. It also felt like the right way to close things out because we had started the trip with ramen in Lisbon, tired and a little disoriented after a long travel day, and now we were ending it with ramen in Cascais, tired again but for much better reasons.

So that was our last full day in Portugal: caves, castles, one final nap, a second night of surprise beach rock concert, and ramen bringing the whole trip full circle.

Not a bad way to end it.