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The physics students from Coimbra took Jon and me to Sintra, a 45 minute drive along winding roads north of the Castelinho.
Our main destination was Quinta da Regaleira, an impressive estate built on top of a hill at the turn of the century by an
Italian scenographer-architect named Luigi Manini. The place, so right for its time, was built in the Romantic style, with
winding paths, lots of ´water features´as they would say on one of those home decorating shows on TLC, and chimneys built
to look like old trees to maximize the place's integration with nature. The brochure that came along with the rather dull
2 hour tour describes this place as 'a place to be felt'. I wouldn't exactly put it in such grand terms, but it was a fine
place to spend the afternoon.
In addition to being a home, Quinta da Regaleira was used as Masonic headquarters. There is an impressive imitation well
that descends 9 levels into the earth that is damp and is supposed to resemble, as the brochure says, ' the womb of Mother
earth'. Whoever wrote the brochure was certainly given to exaggeration. In any case, Jon and I got a little lost since we
tended to wander away from the tour, and we ended up trying to make our way out of this well via a totally dark tunnel. Jon's
night vision is about nil and we didn't have a light to go by, so we ended up using our cameras as improvisational flashlights
and stumbled and felt our way out of this tunnel. Excitement for the day.
Before returning to Castelinho, we stopped at a bakery in Sintra known for making the best examples of the local pastry
called 'Pillows of Sintra'. These pastries have a flakey exterior, with a sweet custard in the middle and a dusting of granulated
sugar outside. We had 45 people ahead of us in line to buy these things, if that's some indication of the popularity of both
the pastry and the shop itself.
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