MarkandJim.com

Mark in Lisbon’s Cathedral

And finally our last stop on this Portugal Explorer was Lisbon, the capital and largest city. There is a lot to like about Lisbon – some great food, a top-notch boutique hotel, beautiful architecture, important history – but somehow it didn’t grab me as much as most European capitals do, or even as much as Porto did on the start of this trip.

Perhaps it’s just that we got off on a bad start. We returned our rental car on arriving in Lisbon and it was just an awful experience. Filling the gas tank on the outskirts of the city was ridiculously challenging – it probably took 15 or even 20 minutes, just extreme inefficiency. And then we were supposed to return it to a Europcar location in the city and when we go to the address there was absolutely no sign of a car return. We drove around a couple times but nothing. We tried to call the help number the agency gave us when we picked the car up and repeatedly just got a recording (in Portuguese so we had no idea what they were saying). Eventually we decided to try a ramp to … something underground … and sure enough, there it was. A sign outside would have helped.

The Palácio Principe Real, our glorious hotel for three nights

From there things got better. Our hotel was an 18th century palace that had stood empty for some 15 years before the owners, Gail & Miles, started restoring it and turning it into a hotel. It’s almost hard to believe that this the first (and last, they assure us) hotel they’ve ever done. It’s as though they had traveled the world, found all the little niggling mistakes that other hotels make, and corrected them all. The grounds were beautiful with a heated pool and very pleasant places to read and relax, and breakfasts were great.

There were some nice neighborhoods to wander around in but surprisingly there weren’t any great museums or cathedrals that you just had to see. One of the highlights of the city is the area called Belém, much of which was built out when Portugal was a rising imperial power so it has all that massive architecture displaying the now-spent glory that was once Portugal. Mark and I went down to look around but ultimately we didn’t actually do much.

Mark in front of the Monument of Discoveries in Belém, celebrating Portugal’s role in the 15th and 16th centuries Age of Discovery. When we got to it I realized the monument is literally the only thing that I remembered from my one visit to Lisbon 20-plus years ago.

The other highlight for us was that our NY friend David – last seen a few days ago at the wedding – came to Lisbon while we were there and stayed at our little boutique hotel. We have somewhat different schedules – he would be finishing breakfast as we were getting ready to go to lunch – but it was fun going to dinner with him and just spending way more time than we normally would in New York. But then it was Saturday morning and time to go to the airport – our little trip through Portugal was great fun, but now it was over.

The view of our courtyard from our hotel room. And while I didn’t get any great pictures of our friend David, that’s actually him sitting on one of the chairs at the pool talking to Mark.

Lunch at a great tapas restaurant on our last day

In keeping with our experiences in both Porto and Coimbra, Lisbon was pretty hilly with a lot of steps. I learned during this trip that the kene tendonitis I suffered with for well over a year was really, truly gone – if all this elevation didn’t cause it to flare up nothing will.

The former Jerónimos Monastery in Belém dating from the early 16th century. It was built near the site of Vasco da Gama’s first voyage linking Europe to Asia via the ocean. It now houses his remains along with those of several former Portuguese kings.

Mark in front of the Belém Tower, a 16th century fortification that marked the embarkation point for Portuguese world explorers

The Cathedral

Inside the Cathedral

Just a cool Lisbon street. We found Lisbon somewhat grittier than most Western European cities we’ve visited. It had an aura of faded glory that was beautiful at times and a little sad at other times.

Lunch on arrival at our beautiful hotel

And breakfast

While the port of Lisbon remains an enormous work area – really cutting off the city from the mouth of the Tagus River – this area for sailboats was prettier

Beautiful and tasty sirloin at a cool Indian tapas place called Gunpowder

Mark at lunch savoring some octopus in front of him and a really great bottle of Portuguese wine

And random bears inside a random doorway

The spectacular coastline just a short walk out of Lagos

After the wedding we did a 3-1/2 hour drive down to the Algarve, the region of Portugal that runs along the Southern Atlantic coast. The Algarve is Portugal’s beach playground, with a series of resort towns, of all different characters, dotting the whole coast.

We chose the town of Lagos, close to the western edge of the Algarve. Lagos (the “s” at the end is pronounced like “sh.”) is known as something of a bustling British summer vacation enclave. Because we are here pre-season, we will not enjoy a proper beach experience, but then we will miss out on the partying Brit crowds as well. A reasonable trade-off.

The highlight of the area is a coastline just outside the town that is lined with gorgeous coves and rock formations. A wonderful hiking route leads you to viewpoint after stunning viewpoint. And it was nice to enjoy these trails without the crowds that must be coming as the weather warms up. Jim went a step further, spending a fair amount of time on one of the beaches and enjoying a swim way too frigid for my taste.

This was a nice, low-key stop for a few days, especially after the fun chaos of the wedding. The weather was intermittent, but offered a good dose of sunshine for exploring this stunning coastline.

We love flaming chorizo!

After that wonderful lunch of tapas and flaming chorizo, a rainstorm suddenly came out of nowhere. You can’t tell from this picture that it’s pouring rain behind me, forcing us to stay and have a glass of wine to wait it out.

More Algarve coastline

Our hotel, just inside the old city walls, offered a lovely pool and huge internal gardens, where they grow lots of fresh ingredients for the restaurant

A church in a pretty town square

Jim does a selfie on the hiking trail

In Indian restaurants they think it’s weird when we don’t order rice or bread. But the pretty colors make up for what’s missing in texture.

Elegant homefronts in this low-rise town

Loving the gorgeous hiking

One night at dinner we overheard people at another table talking about “the wedding.” Later someone mentioned “Accenture,” the company where Hajir works. So we had to ask, and indeed we enjoyed meeting Neha and Payton, whom we hadn’t manage to meet at the wedding itself.

Jim takes a “refreshing” swim

One more look at this coastline

Margaret and Hajir arrive for one of many festive events, in one of Margaret’s many costume changes, at this epic wedding

So finally we get to the main point of this trip: Margaret & Hajir’s wedding. They chose as the location the Alentejo wine region. It’s worth noting that while the Douro Valley wine region – the second stop on this Portugal Explorer tour of ours – is a reasonably confined discrete area, the Alentejo region spreads across fully a third of the country. And unlike the area around our Six Senses stop in the north, where we were literally surrounded by multiple wineries, down here you can drive miles without seeing a single vine.

That is to say this is a very different wine region compared to up north. Still, because it is a largely rural and dispersed area there was no single large hotel or resort to house the hundred-plus people Margaret and Hajir were expecting for the ceremony. Instead we were spread out for miles in various inns and guesthouses and winery-hotels.

The beautiful countryside around Assumar

Mark & I ended up in an absolutely lovely small guesthouse in the tiny town of Assumar, certainly the smallest town we have stayed at in years. And the country boy that’s still in me loved the stop. We were only there for two nights but both days I went for long walks in the country (joined by Mark for one of them), discovering cork trees, grazing sheep and cattle, a huge solar farm, and plenty of mud. I love living in Manhattan but you don’t get a lot of opportunity for country walks there so I did my best to make up for it in Assumar.

The turn-around point of one walk. I’d wanted to go a little further, and this pleasant pasture was inviting, but Walt had warned me that the cattle here were aggressive beef cattle, not docile milk cows. I saw them spread across the path, saw the big horns on most of them, and decided discretion was the better part of valor. I turned around and thus survived to write this blog.

Besides great walks in the country two memories from Assumar stand out. When we first arrived – delayed some 45 minutes by a terrible accident on the highway down there – our host Walt took us to the tiny restaurant in town where the menu was … ribs. Really good ribs, I should add, in the most typical small-town café filled with old men who probably sit there every day, telling the same stories. There was no menu – you ate what he was cooking that day. There were side dishes, however, three of them to be precise. Potatoes, potatoes, and potatoes, cooked in three different ways. Not the meal I would normally choose but a genuinely unforgettable meal.

And then just the guesthouse itself. Walt & Hilde, the proprietors, had recently restored an old farmhouse; I don’t remember just how old but at least a couple hundred years. They couldn’t have been lovelier, our room was big and bright, and they even had a pool in the backyard. Of course, notwithstanding the early April calendar I went in for a dip. Cold but exhilarating.

Walt and Hilde the absolutely lovely hosts at our Assumar guesthouse

And then of course there was the wedding. We’ve socialized with the couple for dinners and parties at both our house and theirs and one thing we were confident of was that there would be enough alcohol. In fact we were a little concerned because the wedding ceremony (ceremonies) themselves were scheduled to last some 10+ hours, with open bars the whole time. And as if that weren’t enough there were dedicated tequila- and whiskey-bearers wandering around throughout ready to help anyone in need.

We didn’t know many of the people at the wedding but we’d met John at a dinner party at Margaret & Hajir’s just a couple weeks ago and have known Alice almost since we first moved to New York, so it was fun to spend time with both of them

In fact it was all pretty fabulous – a somewhat traditional Persian ceremony to reflect Hajir’s family, a more English country estate ceremony complete with arrivals on white horses, a planned escape by hot air balloon that had to get scrubbed because of the weather, and plenty of food, music, and socializing. All in all we had a pretty fabulous time.

It was scheduled to be a two-and-a-half hour drive from Coimbra down to Assumar. Instead no more than a minute or two before we got to this spot there was a terrible accident; a car hidden behind that van was demolished. It didn’t appear that anyone died but at least one person had to wait for the emergency responders to get removed from the car. A good reminder to drive carefully.

The wonderful and memorable lunch in Assumar

Me with ribs and potatoes. Before the bill came I asked Mark if he thought it would come to under or over €50; we both thought maybe a little under. In fact it was €32. We can’t afford not to come on vacation here!

A grove of 400-year-old cork trees. Walt explained that it takes 10 years after removing the bark to make corks for the tree to recover before it is ready for “harvesting” again. So they paint a big white digit on the tree to show when it was last harvested; this tree, obviously, had its bark removed in 2019 and will be ready again in 2029.

Another shot of our country walk

Margaret and Hajir arrive to one of the ceremonies on horses. This all looked good but a second later the horses decided to be less cooperative….

Some pictures of friends, old and new. Here are Elizabeth and David.

Alice and Najeen, cousin of the groom

Sarah, Laure, and Laura. Notice Mark, reflected in the mirror behind them, taking this picture.

Me with Robert, father of the groom (and official tequila bearer), and Kylie from Indiana

Rebecca, Annie, Kris, & Leah. I’d complimented Kris on his tie when he explained it was his daughter’s hair bow and she didn’t want to wear it any more so he turned it into a festive tie!

You recognize us!

Here we are again with Walt and Hilde who joined the early part of the festivities

The vows, with officiant cousin Hasti. You’ll notice that instead of traditional bridesmaids and groomsmen Hajir & Margaret are joined at the front by the tequila- and whiskey-bearers. I mean, you never know when you might need a little extra nip!

The entire group from our little guesthouse: David, Linda (mother of the bride), Sarah, Laura, Greg, Jake, Mark, me, and Tina, aunt of the bride

And one final view of the serenity of the Assumar countryside