Back to the good old days – or as we want them to be remembered

Day 26: Sintra, Portugal –  Pena Palace, National Sintra Palace, and Moorish Castle

The Portuguese dictator, Salazar, when looking for inspiration to lead his country out of the 1930’s great depression, decided to look back to the 1500’s when Portugal was the world power.  He recreated the great Royal halls at the National Sintra Palace as he envisioned they should have been, not as they actually were, to show the positive impacts of the country’s globalization and not the negative impacts of their continued colonization from Africa to southeast Asia.   We find other remnants of ‘helping’ people know their place – the curtain in the chapel that the King would stay behind (just like Wizard of Oz) to keep the “mystery” alive, the grand kitchens to show how the royalty could feed their people and when there was a grand banquet (not too often) everyone had their place to sit, the grand rooms with large doors to welcome the people, and the smaller doors that lead to places just meant for the Royalty.

As we walk through the now touristy hillside town of Sintra, we experience several people’s vision – a restored castle of what one king in the 1800’s thought it should have been when the Moors first built it in the 1100’s.   Then his grand idea of a ‘play’ castle first remodeled from the monastery (after they outlawed religious orders) and then his own addition with a draw bridge, an angry looking Triton guarding one gate, add some minarets and a clock tower, then put some tiles all around.  It predates the original one that inspired Disney (Castle Neuschwansteinl) by 20 years.

We enjoy playing around both castle grounds and think this could be the ultimate location for capture the flag.  As the fog comes in, it reminds us of playing hide and seek with our own kids at Machu Pichu many years ago.

We walk back down through the gardens which now house some of the native Portuguese species. We pass the multitude of hikers heading up and don’t have the heart to tell them they still have a long way to go, straight up, to the castles, which we are glad we conquered early on in the much cooler morning when it felt like we were the only ones around.

We finish the day at a local restaurant that flows into the neighborhood park.  We start to believe our own vision – that we have stumbled onto our own secret place, until we notice a lot of other people speaking English have just happened to join us as well.  Hmm..

We take some comfort that we see dogs, children, and the real clincher is the dad with his son coming back from the local corner market with toilet paper.

Maybe it is both.  Maybe there can be mutual visions at the same time.