My Favorite Spot in Portugal

My favorite part of our trip to Portugal was the visit to Obidos, late on December 30th. Until the 15^th century, Obidos stood on the coast. (The coast has now shifted about 14 miles west to where Peniche currently is.) It contains a 10^th century castle and ramparts that encircle the entire village. (Thus the name “Obidos” from the Latin oppidum for walled in city or fortress.) Until the middle of the 12^th century it was the property of the Moors. In 1148, as part of the Reconquista going on in Portugal and Spain, Christians took it. Beginning in the 13^th century, Obidos became the traditional wedding gift given by Portuguese kings to their queens.

The town is surrounded by farmland, vineyards, and (though it was twilight as we arrived) I think I even saw an old fashioned windmill or two. Inside the walls are narrow, cobblestone streets and whitewashed houses with the traditional terracotta roofs we saw in most villages we explored. Several of the houses seemed to be lined with the beautiful tiles of the 17^th and 18^th centuries, though the crowds made it impossible to stop and look carefully at any of them.

As you approach Obidos during the Christmas season, you notice that the castle and ramparts are all encircled in lights. The main street which cuts through the town, goes through the praca that houses the Igreja de Santa Maria, and ends at the castle, has strings lights suspended overhead, huge varieties of decorated Christmas trees along its way, and periodically other types of Christmas decorations. When we arrived, the police were directing vehicles away from the town, which was packed to overflowing. But, because so many people wanted to see the special decorations and be part of the Christmas-New Year’s celebration, they were parking along the main roads outside of the town and hiking into the area. We were pretty sure that all we were going to get to see was the outside of the lit village walls but Joachim, our driver, told the police that we were Americans who had traveled to Portugal specifically to see Obidos during this special event. We were not only allowed through the barricades but allowed to park right next to the beginning of the “celebration walk” down the main street. Go figure!

We entered the city through the Porta de Vila, the southern town gate which was decorated with tiles. Along with the rest of the jostling crowd, we moved quickly through the lit main street, glancing at the decorations as we went and enjoying the smell of the roasting chestnuts coming from several venders’ booths along the way.

At one point we all paused because Becca wasn’t with us anymore. I made my way back a block or two and found her stopped as one of the turns in the road, shopping and talking in a combination of French and Spanish with a local man who made some earrings she was interested in buying.

We continued toward the castle, stopping along the way for the traditional Christmas drink of "Ginjinha de Obidos" (a liqueur similar to sherry made with Ginja berry), which is served in cups made of chocolate.

A little later, we arrived at the Igreja de Santa Maria, which was outlined in white lights and a large nativity scene set up in the praca.

Because it was getting late, rather than continuing through the main street to the castle, we decided to cut through side streets—in the process seeing a little of the rest of the village that wasn’t decorated for the holidays—and circle back to the car.

While I enjoyed the rest of my time in Portugal, Obidos will be what I will most remember about the trip. Being there gave me more of a sense of the history of the area than I felt in any of the places more formally set up to “capture” history—the Castelo de Sao Jorge, the winding streets of the Alfama, the Abbey at Batalha, or the Palacio Nacional de Queluz. And being in a crowd that was 99% Portuguese—who hadn’t come to the place as tourists, but to stand in this ongoing Portuguese tradition and celebrate the holidays together—also added to the special feeling of the place.

Outside of Lisbon

We spent two of our days in Portugal doing tours of areas immediately outside of Lisbon.


On Saturday, we visited the Placio Nacional de Queluz, an 18^th century palace with formal gardens to match.
Walking into the first room of the palace and then looking at the gardens afterwards, I was reminded of the Chateau de Versailles. From there, after dropping me back at the hotel to deal with an upset stomach, Kathy and Becca continued on to Sintra and its neighboring villages.

The writer Jose Saramago rightly describes the Palacio Nacional de Sintra as a “building whose individual components are characterized by fantasy, insensibility, bad taste and improvisation” with “the romantic excess of the exterior” not deserving “the bourgeois excess of the interior.”

Each exterior of the Palacio seems to have a different imposing exterior, some painted, some tiled, and some with turrets.

Balustrades and the domes on top of many of the turrets add to the Moorish feeling of the place. The town itself, with narrow streets, also reflected this mood.

From Sintra, Kathy and Becca drove along the coast to Cabo da Roca, with its spectacular views of the coast. They traveled through resort towns and upscale fishing villages. Cabo da Roca is the westernmost point of all continental Europe. There’s a lighthouse and a monument there with the words of Portugal’s national poet, Luis de Camoes, declaring that this is "where the land ends and the sea begins".

The next day, a Sunday, we headed out to Fatima, the place where Our Lady of Fatima is said to have appeared to three peasant children back in 1917.

The esplanade at Fatima is huge –much bigger than Saint Peter’s Square, where we’d been the previous year on the same day--and could easily hold more than a million people with no problem.

On one side of the square is the Capela das Aparicoes, a simple building next to the oak three where Mary appeared. All that exists in the building is a simple altar surrounded on three sides with an aisle, where people who are taking vows to say the rosary on a regular basis move on their knees from one end to the other, and plain benches on which to sit and pray. To the left of the Capela das Aparicoes is a place of where large, five foot candles, can be bought and lit in honor of Mary. On the right of the esplanade is another small chapel, the Perpetual Adoration Chapel, where the host is continually exposed so that people can gather before it in silence and prayer.

But the largest building on the site is the basilica, which was begun in 1928 and finished in 1953. Mass was going on while we were there, so we only got to see a few of the fifteen altars it contains. The sanctuary itself didn’t impress me much, although I did enjoy the stained glass windows at the very top of the basilica walls. On the right side of the basilica are the stations of the cross, done in mosaic and reflecting a much more modern sense than is actually true. And of course, behind the basilica is a huge gift shop, where you can buy religious statues, rosaries, and just about any other kind of Catholic paraphernalia you could think of. Seeing it all, one wonders how many tears Mary has wept on behalf of the poor as the money was used to build this site. Or, as Saramago summarizes the area, “only faith can save Fatima, not the beauty it does not possess.”

We left the formal site of Fatima, drove past statues of the three children watching over their sheep, and went to the much, much poorer area of Fatima to see the houses of the three children involved in the appearances. First we saw the house of Francisco and Jacinta Marto, then the house and lands of their much wealthier cousin, Lucia dos Santos. I was surprised by the latter, since historically Mary appears to the poor, not those who are wealthier land owners. Joachim, our driver, suggested that Lucia was included in the vision because of her considerably poorer cousins. It left me wondering, however, why the poorer cousins died within a short time after the appearance, but Lucia lived to a ripe old age and only died a few years ago.

As we were looking at the statue of the angel’s appearance that’s been put in one of the fields that Lucia’s family owned, Joachim also gave us a lesson on cork trees and how cork is made. Somehow this struck me as much more satisfying than what I’d learned about Fatima.

From Fatima we headed in the direction of Obidos, the place I most wanted to see in Portugal.

We stopped at Batalha, where we saw the magnificent abbey cathedral with its Gothic pinnacles, spires and towers and soaring interior.

We all enjoyed both the church and the small square outside with its shops and sat in the square, enjoying a few of Portugal’s traditional pastries as our quick “late lunch” break. From there we drove through the Pinhal de Leira, a 700-year-old pine forest growing in sandy land that reminded me very much of the drive along the Pilgrim highway on Cape Cod. We sat in bumper to bumper traffic to get into Nazare, a small fishing village with local women, each dressed in a series of short skirts and selling nuts and dried fruit, lining the squares. The sun was beginning to sink as we drove out of the area and headed to Obidos, our last stop of the trip.

Lisbon

We spent two of our four days in Portugal in Lisbon, the first exploring the Baixa and the last walking through the Alfama and the Castelo de Sao Jorge.

The Baixa is the part of Lisbon that was rebuilt in the 18^th century after an earthquake destroyed most of what was then Lisbon’s main center. It’s an area beautifully laid out with mosaic pavements and classical buildings of no more than five stories (so that they could withstand any future earthquakes) whose storefronts contained international brand shops and pavement cafes and have beautiful tiled facades. We entered it through the Praça do Comercio, a large square right on the waterfront. There are two important pieces of architecture—a statue of Dom Jose in them idle of the praça and a triumphal arch as you enter the Baixa’s main streets. On the Rua Augusta, no vehicles are allowed so street musicians, craftsfolk, and artists set up to show their work as you walk along the way. Becca was enthralled by the combination of places to shop and craftspeople. She bought jewelry from vendors, shopped for a pair of flats in one of the shoe stores,

and had her caricature done by one of the street artists. We sauntered through the streets, seeing the Elevador de Santa Justa,

resting for a while near Robert Indiana’s well-known Love sculptures that decorate Rossio Square, and getting our first glimpse of the Castelo de Sao Jorge from the Praça da Figueira, which was itself filled with what looked like a large indoor (roller or ice?) skating rink and some kind of XBox 360 game tent.

We circled back toward the Praça do Comercio. By then all the Christmas decorations in the area had been lit u p. Becca shopped a little more. We ate traditional pastries and then later that evening dinner at the Restaurante Martinho da Arcada, one of Lisbon’s most famous literary landmarks that has been open since 1782. There it is said that Fernando Pessoa (who Harold Bloom calls the most representative poet of the twentieth century and who has become something of an icon in Lisbon) wrote his epic “Mensagem”. And two other Portuguese literary legends, Almeida Garret and novelist Jose Eça de Queirós also used to hang out at this café. Once dinner hour arrived (7:30 is the earliest restaurants open for dinner in Portugal) the place filled up quickly. Our meals—we each had a different kind of fish—was very good, though by the end of the meal I was exhausted from the long day and was more than ready to get in a taxi and head back to the hotel.

On our last day in Portugal, we again headed back to Lisbon. We did a quick tram tour of the older areas of the city, then walked off in the direction of the Alfama. We made into several different churches, none of which struck as as amazing inside. But we spent a while at the tiny church of Santa Luzia. On its walls are panels made of 18^th-century azulejos (the traditional blue and white tiles), one of which showed what the Praça do Comercio looked like before the 18^th century earthquake and the other showed the siege of Lisbon (and especially the Castelo de Sao Jorge) in 1147. From the church’s gardened terrace are also great views of the Alfama and the Tagus River. We continued up hill a short while to the Miradouro das Portas del Sol, where a street musician was playing fado music on his guitar.

From its balcony there were even more stunning views of the Tagus and the old city of Lisbon as well as a statue of Saint Vincent de Fora (who is Lisbon’s patron saint) holding two ravens (the best-known symbols of Lisbon). Urged on by Kathy’s continual “It’s only three more blocks” (said after every three or four blocks we’d walked) we continued our walk up to Saint George’s Castle, stopping briefly to look at some ancient tiles and later to watch an artist actually making new tiles.

The Castelo de Sao Jorge was very busy on New Year’s Eve as people gathered to celebrate the end of 2007. We walked through the castle’s gardens and courtyards, enjoying glimpses of a different part of Lisbon (including many of the private home gardens) from its heights, and then entered the castle itself. I climbed one of the walls up to what the view from the turrets would be like but it wasn’t much better than from the garden below.

Later, to prove she could do it despite her dislike of heights, Becca also went up on one of the walls.

By then it was beginning to get dark, so we left the castle and headed back down through the Alfama toward the Baixa, stopping at one point to watch swarms of tiny birds (I’d guess a good 200 or so flying together) make unusual shapes in the sky as they rode the currents coming off the Tagus. By the time we arrived back in the Praça do Comercio, lots of people were gathered to hear the performing bands and await the fireworks that would go off nearby over the river at the strike of midnight as people prepared to ring in 2008.

Staying at Pestana Palace

We’re back from Portugal, beginning to adjust back from the five hour time difference, and catching up on the work that piled up from before Christmas.

We got into Lisbon early on the morning December 28^th and went straight to the hotel that Kathy’s brother-in-law, who is a travel agent, booked for us. It was called the Pestana Palace and it turned out to be rated as one of the top “Best Luxury Hotels in the World”. Located on a steep hill in the Alto Santa Amaro quarter of Lisbon, Pestana Palace overlooks the Tagus River. The Palace was built in 1904 for the Marquis de Valle Flor and his three daughters, whose portraits can be found in many of the rooms. It has ceiling paintings and portraits by Carlos Reis, a great 19^th century Portuguese artist, and has been carefully restored to its former Romantic Revivalist glory with room after room of opulence to sit in.

From the lights on the huge pine tree (to the right in this picture) as we rode up the driveway through to the Grand Ballroom (now the Valle Flor restaurant where we ate most of our breakfasts and one dinner), the place was decorated for the holidays. Even the chapel, which seats about 40 people and served as the site of a wedding on the Saturday we were there, was decorated for Christmas.

Our bedrooms were located in the modern extension to the room and, while they had a great view of the large private garden filled with subtropical plants and trees (several of which were still in bloom), they were otherwise very basic, especially in comparison to the rest of the place. Fortunately, except for the afternoon I spent in the hotel because of an upset stomach, none of us hung out in our rooms.

The food at the hotel was a different story. While breakfasts were very good with many different choices in the daily buffet, the rest of the food didn’t live up to the “Portuguese cuisine of the highest standard” which reviews say it serves. On the night that we ate in the dining room, as we were surrounded by ornate ceilings, windows, and marbled columns, the best parts of our meals were the rolls and one of the desserts, a crème brulee. My cod was overly salty, the waiter confused orders several times, and none of us were very happy with the food that we were given in exchange for the large bill at the end. But we thought maybe it was a fluke, so we tried again and ordered room service another night when we were tired from a full day of walking around seeing Lisbon, only to find that the food was equally bad and equally expensive.

Other amenities were so-so. The spa had a very small Jacuzzi and, while it was great to swim several evenings, the pool was small for the number of people who used it, especially on the weekend. The internet in our room didn’t work right so Becca had to make numerous trips to the Business Center to stay in contact with her friends.

The hotel wouldn’t have been my choice of a place to stay—I’d rather spend the money on the actual travel than on accommodations—but I think Becca loved all the glamour of the place, from the rose petals placed in the toilet bowl during bed turndown in the evening to the chocolates and raisins delivered to each room on New Year’s Eve to capture a Portuguese tradition of wishes of fertility and abundance for the upcoming year.