AZVOLRIEN

The wedding wasn't until 3pm, so that morning I took a stroll along to the neighbouring town of Cascais, which has a pretty lighthouse with its own little adjoining museum, a sizeable marina enclosed within a sturdy sea wall, and a nice little park with a lot of cockerels wandering around in apparent harmony and a pond full of terrapins.

The lower floor houses a lot of smaller tanks, as well as the lower viewing windows for the five big main ones. Residents include (but are not limited to) a couple of cuttlefish, a group of garden eels, leafy sea dragons, some amphibians, and a whole lot of corals.

The central tank is surrounded by four other main display areas, one in each corner of the building, focussing on different oceanic regions: in order, the North Atlantic, with a huge aviary housing puffins and guillemots; the Southern Ocean with Magellanic penguins and free-flying inca terns; the north Pacific with a pair of sea otters; and the coral reefs of the Indian Ocean. Each area also includes large display tanks that you can look into from the lower floor of the building as well as the upper walkways.

The sea otters were fun to watch, but difficult to get good photos of. They swam around their tank so quickly that those were the only ones I got that were even vaguely in focus.

The day after Sintra, I went back into Lisbon by myself - we weren't staying in the city proper, but in Estoril along the coast a bit to the west - to visit the Oceanarium (Oceanário de Lisboa). This is one of the biggest aquaria in Europe, and still pretty high on the list worldwide.

Built out in the middle of a lagoon by the Tagus, the Oceanarium centres around one gigantic two-storey tank housing numerous sharks and rays as well as other species of fish, including an ocean sunfish! This was pretty exciting to see, because until coming here the only sunfish I'd ever seen was just a model in the old fish gallery at the museum. Most of the other species were ones that I'd already seen in other aquaria; sand tiger sharks are a particularly popular exhibit, because they look suitably intimidating but are actually fairly chill.

Irrelevant aside, I'm pretty sure there was an anime convention going on somewhere nearby, because I noticed a lot of cosplayers wandering around as I was walking from the metro station. I saw at least three Luffys and a couple more guys who may have just coincidentally been wearing red tops and denim shorts.

We rounded off our day at Sintra with a visit to the Castle of the Moors (Castelo dos Mouros) which looms over the town and provides some pretty cracking views out over the surrounding area, over Sintra itself and the Pena Palace on the neighbouring hills, all the way over to the 25th of April Bridge in Lisbon.

We didn't climb all the way up to the castle, because it was hot and we were already tired. We hired a tuktuk to take us up to the ticket booth and went from there.

The highlight for me at Sintra was the Quinta da Regaleira. This is basically some rich bloke's country estate. I wasn't all that interested in the palace itself - really, once you've seen one stately home you've kinda seen them all - but the guy really went all out with the garden design. Got a lot of freemasonry-type bumf in there, with lots of little statues and grottos dotted around and a network of tunnels underneath everything.

The centrepiece is probably what's called the Initiation Well. This isn't a well in the sense of being a water source - though it is pretty damp down there - but is more of an inverted tower, being a deep pit with a spiral staircase around the outside, eventually leading into the aforementioned tunnels.

You read Naomi Novik's Scholomance trilogy? This is where they find the doors to the school in the third book. The queue to get down the well wasn't as long as the book implies; it was probably only a 15-minute wait or so.

We took a bus up to Sintra for the second day. This historic town sits up in the hills above Lisbon, and was kind of a country retreat for various Portuguese royals and other rich folk. Accordingly it has a lot of pretty architecture perched up on the hills.

You might notice that's the second time I've mentioned the hills. Seriously, wear some comfy walking shoes if you visit. Sintra has a great deal of Up.

Now, I'm aware that I don't really update this blog frequently enough for most people to have noticed a few days' absence, but I was actually in Lisbon last weekend (Thursday to Tuesday, strictly) for a cousin's wedding. I've been to Portugal before - we had a holiday on the Algarve when I was little, I think about eight or nine - but this was the first time I'd been to the capital area. Fortunately the wedding was only a one-afternoon event, so there was plenty of time for a bit of sightseeing before and after.