It’s a real Sintra

Years ago, Marida’s brother had a really bad experience with a used car – a real lemon – and from that point on, he and his wife referred to any lo-down dastardly evil-doer their lives by the name of the guy who sold them the car.

For me, henceforward, any completely denatured, once-impressive but now shot-over, has-lost-its-soul-to-tourism site will be a “Sintra.”

One of our first outings after landing in the mainland Portugal was to visit Sintra. This hilled town outside Lisbon has an illustrious history, twisting cobbled streets, and a variety of glorious piles built by aristocratic families over the ages, all clustered in the shadow of the Pena Palace and its curated gardens on the hilltop. Crawling around these attractions are thousands, pe-sellirhaps millions of tourists and an equivalent number of tour buses, trams with speakers, guides hawking themselves to potential customers, and sputtering, roaring lawnmower-engine “tuk-tuks” spewing two-stroke fumes as they haul two or three tourists at a time up the mountain. We took one. It was fun, if you don’t count the brain cells we lost due to the exhaust fumes.

In Sintra, the lure of tourist dollars has massively beaten out protecting local heritage and – sadly – the ability of visitors to truly experience it.

Pena Palace

We had heard that this place was crowded, but that was not strictly accurate. It was more like a hornet’s nest in a dumpster fire at the zoo. We had timed entry tickets that were clearly for show, as the mile-long line of hot tired people toiling up, into, and through the castle at a snail’s pace demonstrated. When we finally reached the palace itself, beautiful and swathed in fog, the stone faces carved in the column capitals echoed our feelings with various expressions of dismay, boredom, fear, rage, and desperation as we slugged our way through.

Cascais

We had a day in Cascais, which is much quieter than Sintra and quite lovely with its cobblestoned port and walls. But there was also a sense here of a place struggling to remain a living breathing city rather than become just the backdrop for selfie snappers.