"Portugal pleases at every turn
From an elegant palace in modern Lisbon to a rustic castle in the medieval town of Óbidos, the Iberian landscape mesmerizes.
LISBON — Do you daydream about luxury lodgings with well-stocked bars and sculpted gardens? Discreet clerks and waiters who will attend to your every need? Or do your flights of fancy tend toward something more rustic: a walled fortress, perhaps, with commanding views of the lands below?
To put it another way: Do you want to stay in a palace — or a castle?
Sometimes it's possible to do both, as I discovered on a spring trip to Portugal. It turns out the "royal treatment" fulfilled a fantasy that I wasn't even aware of — until I walked right into it. My husband, Steve, and I had spent a few days in Madrid, visiting our daughter who was studying there, and we had decided we needed to see more of the Iberian Peninsula. We took a train to Basque country for a few days and then flew from Bilbao to Lisbon."
To put it another way: Do you want to stay in a palace — or a castle?
Sometimes it's possible to do both, as I discovered on a spring trip to Portugal. It turns out the "royal treatment" fulfilled a fantasy that I wasn't even aware of — until I walked right into it. My husband, Steve, and I had spent a few days in Madrid, visiting our daughter who was studying there, and we had decided we needed to see more of the Iberian Peninsula. We took a train to Basque country for a few days and then flew from Bilbao to Lisbon."
