Saturday was spent in the countryside outside Lisboa, in a town called Sintra. Sitting in beautiful natural surroundings of mountains and green hills, Sintra is a noble town surrounded by many estates, pleasant woods with plentiful springs of excellent water and has of old been a drawing card for the more fortunate among the Portuguese who have built palaces, summer residences, castles and other means of fortification and seasonal entertainment there. It´s a landscape of giant boulders, pine trees, ferns and foxgloves and very heavily wooded.
The weather started out nice enough (cloudy but dry) at the Moorish Fort, but soon changed as we climbed up to the Palácio da Pena where we got rather soaked and wandered not lonely as a cloud, but lost in cloud. We were certainly not lonely in the cloud(s) as hundreds of other locals and tourists had chosen this day, completely against the expectation of the people managing the estates, to come and view the architectural and historical treasures. The movie below shows how we were actually in cloud; see the clouds move from right to left. From the Moorish Castle on the other side of the valley we had already seen such clouds descend on the Palácio earlier ...
A great description of Sintra can also be found here: ´Sintra is an amazing place both for its natural landscape and for the varied and exotic buildings that have been erected there since the 9th century when the Moors started the trend with their crenelated fortress, its walls striding the hilltops, right through to the 20th century with several remarkable palaces of great architectural acclaim. Sintra and its immediate environs are justifiably included on the Unesco World Heritage list.´
The weather started out nice enough (cloudy but dry) at the Moorish Fort, but soon changed as we climbed up to the Palácio da Pena where we got rather soaked and wandered not lonely as a cloud, but lost in cloud. We were certainly not lonely in the cloud(s) as hundreds of other locals and tourists had chosen this day, completely against the expectation of the people managing the estates, to come and view the architectural and historical treasures. The movie below shows how we were actually in cloud; see the clouds move from right to left. From the Moorish Castle on the other side of the valley we had already seen such clouds descend on the Palácio earlier ...
A great description of Sintra can also be found here: ´Sintra is an amazing place both for its natural landscape and for the varied and exotic buildings that have been erected there since the 9th century when the Moors started the trend with their crenelated fortress, its walls striding the hilltops, right through to the 20th century with several remarkable palaces of great architectural acclaim. Sintra and its immediate environs are justifiably included on the Unesco World Heritage list.´
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