I try, while being a tourist, to avoid tourist things. It’s a natural corollary to that search for Authentic Experiences; the search that gets me on ferries to nowhere. I’m of course not alone in trying to avoid tourist things. “It’s not tourist-y” is a common recommendation for the American with a suitcase. And there are many reasons for this; some of them good: Sights are often reputed for reasons that have little to with the sights themselves: See it because the stars travel there, or the writer referenced it, or it was in the movie. Don’t see it just because you might find it beautiful, or personally meaningful. Sights can also make for poor experiences: Fly or drive to some notable locale, stand in a forever line, pay through the nose, and jostle for a poorly framed picture. Fun, right?
But there are silly reasons to avoid sights, too. You might avoid a beautiful famous thing just because you fear being cliché or simple, and this can only really mean you fear that other people will find you clichéd and simple.
So, two things:
- If you want to free yourself from both the bad reasons to see shitty tourist sites, and from the fears that might keep you from great tourist sites, it helps not to be engaged online. Though it’s been said many times, many ways, here it is once more: we’re all much, much fucking happier the less we’re on Instagram.
- Sometimes, a sight is just an amazing thing that basically everyone can agree on.
The castles in and around Lisbon are some of those things everyone can agree on. I did not intend to go to them, and I didn’t even know about them at first, because I do the research of a bored toddler before going on trips. But when I was drinking with the Spaniards, Zurra told me, “We went to the castle here. It’s –” she did a kind of shrug and sigh motion that seems particular to Spaniards, or at least Spanish speakers – “everybody goes. But you have to go. It is so good.”
“The castle” is Castelo de Sao Jorge. The bones of a 7th-century Moorish Kasbah (later claimed for Jesus, called the Christ), it grips the top of Lisbon’s tallest hill, curling like fingers up to the knuckle in coffee grounds. With much of the original castle shaved away by time and wind, it makes a grand patio of trees and stone, offering gentle vistas on all sides. Inside the patios, there is enough of the Christian fortress standing or reconstructed that you can acquire even more views, until you’re almost numb to the ceaseless beauty. It is a beauty that staggers. Your knees buckle, up here, as the red-tiled roofs crumble down the hillside into the water, guarded by the great bridge pulling the sides of Lisbon together.
It occurs to me, as the wind lilts across the tile, that I don’t know the name of that bridge. I should learn it, I decide, sometime when I walk down. So I won’t think about it for a while. What I do wonder is: how could anyone fight anyone up here? How did the Portuguese, looking out from this castle, conceive of enslaving people continents away? How could such violence rise out of this gentle river? I don’t get an answer for that one.
The night after Zurra told me where to go, Vesper asks me what I’m going to do tomorrow.
“I think I’m going to go to the tile museum,” I tell her.
“The tile museum?”
“Yeah!” I’m mildly offended. “This whole city is tile – I want to learn how this happened.”
She shakes her head. “Sintra. Go to Sintra.”
For the longest time in this conversation, I think she’s saying “Central.” “What’s Central?” I ask.
“Sintra is the town with the national castle. They have loads of castles up that way. You just hop on the train.”
I sigh. “I just saw a castle today.” (You find yourself saying absurd, entitled shit when you go on vacation.) “I really wanted to spend more time in Lisbon.”
“At the fucking tile museum?”
So the next day I walk to the center of town and hop a train to Sintra.
It’s about 45 minutes out of town. Lisbon gives immediate way to less glamorous Portuguese locales: the towns get thinner, then poorer, then nearly ugly: like Barreiro, but without the gruff seaside charm. Just cheap, unkempt cinderblock apartments. I see some graffiti out the window that says, “Son of the ghetto? Fuck that!”
But as the towns thin, they get a little nicer, again: quaint. Simple. Sintra itself is little more than a roundabout and some shops around the train station; lightly pecked into a hill. Half the stores are for locals, and half are bait for the visitors. The rest of the houses are sprinkled amid grasses and trees, all the way up the hillside. But also, the hillside is fucking lousy with castles. Posted maps and signs point in every direction to some castle or other; like the Portuguese tried to keep up with the neighbors palace for palace for a century or three. (It’s Portugal’s Baroque-Romantic Orange County.)
I’m told, by these maps and some recourse to the internet, that there are two castles somewhere up the top which I should be able to walk in an afternoon. Before I set out, I stop at a small, white-doored shop where locals banter pleasantly. I have a very good espresso, and a sort of empanada construction with some goat cheese that’s almost as good as an egg tart (almost). I don’t have the vocabulary to ask if the thing I think I’m tasting is sweet potato. The global, human obsession with outrageously delicious foodstuffs – I mean, outside of the U.K. – is one of the few things that will make me root for the humans when Google becomes self-aware and turns on us.
The walk up the hill is long and lovely, and I’m not sure at any point where I am in relation to these castles I’m supposed to be finding. I stumble in this way up to the sister fortress to Castelo Sao Jorge, simply called the “Moorish Castle.” The M.C. was a lookout post, placards inform me. Signals would be sent to Lisbon in the event of an invasion.
This seems absurd. It took me most of the morning to get up here, and while I did walk the hill I have the use of a fucking locomotive before that. How would you even see Lisbon from here, or warn Lisbon when your fastest vehicle is a horse? I pay my entrance fee, survey the courtyard, and then follow the signs to climb the outer wall of the castle.
What I see, in crystal relief, is the Atlantic Ocean, and the Tejo emptying into it. I see Lisbon; cleanly and clearly. I am reminded, as I am periodically, that I would have been terrible at just about everything before the typewriter was invented. (“Why would we build a castle there? We’ll never fucking see anything!”) The air up here is so sharp it hits like a drug. Standing on these walls, you can feel the thrill of an alarm – the call from Lisbon. You can feel the boots imprinting the stone. (My latent academic training compels me to say this feeling, however profound, does not mean that I’m walking the same stones watchmen patrolled in the 11th century: most of the upper walls were rebuilt in the first quarter of the 1900s.) (I compulsively read all the placards at these things. Leave me alone.)
I walk tower to tower. It’s very difficult to tire of a view like this. Lesser castles and manors poke their noses out of the trees below. Towns blossom down on the plains. As the wall curls around the ridge, I’m turned back towards another ledge. And there, a half-mile away, I can see it: the Pena Palace. I’m thrilled, and even surprised, by the grandeur of the Moorish Castle; but the Pena is the main event. It’s colored in bright, pastel shades, and sits even higher on this hill (which is very nearly a mountain). Its spires dissolve into the sky. I circle the walls of the Moorish Castle and walk the path up to the Pena.
It’s clear where the park’s priorities lie, and what the tourist manuals recommend: the Pena Palace – The National Palace of Pena to you – is much more expensive to enter, and is well-stocked with staff. It’s also well-stocked with Chinese tourists, who signal by their presence the lowest common travel denominator (this is one arena in which the Chinese are definitely taking over from Americans; I’m willing to forfeit). Still, the Pena Palace is not so crowded as, say, the Empire State Building. It probably helps that, even in the age of bullet trains and jet travel, it still takes just a little bit of work to get up a damn hill.
The Palace, I learn, was built by a self-styled Artist King of Portugal, who took a small monastery on this hilltop and used it as the spine for his extremely Romantic designs. (If you’re not familiar with the Romantic era, it’s basically when the leading houses of Europe got really into The Cure and took heroin by the bucket; c. 1820-1910.) The palace is brightly painted in reds and yellows; blues sweep the courtyard. The intricate walkways weave in and out of each other; tiles and Islamist courtyards brush Christian chapels and Baroque motifs. It’s a heady cocktail.
Heady, but empty. I’ve had this thought over the years about many different swings at grand art: the foppish is never transcendent. My objection to Classical music – and here I don’t mean orchestral music; I mean middle and late 18th-century European court music – is that it was music designed for the pleasure of inbred autocrats wearing powdered wigs, and it sounds like it: it’s dry and silly, full of fluttering noises and petite rivulets of sound flowing nowhere. The pieces from this time that burst through, that actually have some fire in them, are usually speaking to a broader audience (Mozart’s operas; some of Haydn’s symphonies) or are deeply personal (Beethoven’s later string quartets; almost a cliché example of depth and sophistication for music students). This castle is a day-glo dream for a foppish monarch; a dream reconstructed from other, lived realities in German mountains. Those castles were built in their way on top of traditions stretching centuries; this imitative piece is pretty, but is tangibly invented. Made up. It has no weight. The Moorish Castle, in simple stone, is the grander experience; the experience loaded with the freight of conquest and ambition.
Still, I’m glad I saw the Pena Palace. Light though it may be, it pops your eyes. And as a wise woman with a racist card game once told me: you have to go. Everyone goes. It is so good.
Every once in a while it’s good not to overthink tourism. If there’s a fucking castle around, you should probably see the castle.
—
There are buses, and vehicles neither golf cart nor tuk-tuk, that will take you down the mountain from Pena. I wave them all off and walk. The vegetation is wonderful: deep green, but lighter and thinner than in Florida, from where I recognize those deep greens and knotty browns. There are vines, indistinguishable from weeds, that clutch old, squat walls. After a bit of walking, the cars and parking lots give way to actual homes, then small thoroughfares with a few shops. Warrens of modest houses clip into the hillside, like they were engineered for the gentle rock and dirt face; like you could hear the click when they were set in place. I wander off the main road and into one of these hillside villages. It feels very private, and I feel almost ashamed – like I’m peeking into someone’s living room. Not shamed enough, though: I kick stones down simple lanes and stop to admire woven fields.
In one of these pocket towns, I find a grocery store with a rudimentary fridge. It looks like a family shop: the woman at the counter and the man idly checking produce crates share an easy, worn-in familiarity. I can now confidently say one thing in Portuguese, and that thing is, “Can I please have a Super Bock?” It costs basically no money. I’m happy to live in a rich country: I like nice things (which are not to be confused with pretentious or garish things). I think the historically recent increase in global wealth, however bizarre money seems to me as an idea, is a good thing on the whole for most of us. But as the woman at the shop smiles and waves, I’m reminded again that rich Americans are reliably unhappy, and realize that I’m walking back to all my selfish worries, while this woman will probably die in this beautiful place with everyone she loves no further than a mile away. Thoughts like this are why I am happy for Super Bock.
I find a quiet dirt road and a concrete wall on a slope. Under the low wall, the hill falls away and the train station appears below. I have to board in an hour or so. And there’s a good chance I will never make it back to Sintra – I’m unlikely to live in Portugal any time soon, and paying rent is going to have to be a bigger priority in my life than buying airfare (at least, I keep telling myself this). And if this is it, it’s worth it. I sip and stare, like I’ve done all week, and resolve vaguely to learn Portuguese, like I’ve resolved to learn a lot of languages I haven’t. I indulge the fantasy as the sun sets and the beer gets lighter.