On a blue-sky Saturday morning, I joined a foraging hike in Sintra-Cascais nature park, a former municipal wasteland and now thriving ecosystem on the outskirts of Cascais in Portugal. Progress was deliciously slow, thanks to our passionate guide – ecologist Fernanda Botelho, Portugal’s foremost herbalist and wild forager. We’d barely made it out of the park’s welcome centre when she lunged at a bush and held a spiky leaf ahoy.
“Sow thistle,” she proclaimed. “Pigs love it. It’s good for salads, but it too often gets confused with the dandelion.” Everything has its uses, she said, from pine needles for sauces and honey to ash trees for flour and berries of the Peruvian Pink Pepper tree – “planted as an ornamental tree, but it combines very well with chocolate”.
Sintra-Cascais nature park is home to wild horses and deer, 15 hiking trails, including the West Route, a three-day hike (with optional glamping) up to the Sintra mountains. Nippers can ride on a brown, cuddly, cute-as (and, sadly) endangered Miranda donkey. You can also pick organic veg at Pasão Farm, a 380-hectare eco community farm. As someone who can recognise a Brussels-sprout tower but very little else in the edible wild, I think doing so might help with that 30-plants-a-week health malarkey back home.
Today, however, the task was superfluous, for Botelho had teamed up with Cláudia Mataloto of the gastronomic event hub Cascais Food Lab to lay on a nature-to-table alfresco luncheon.
How we feasted. Visitors swarmed around bucolic trestle tables as Food Lab chefs talked through the locally sourced dishes, everything “made with a lot of love”. The “everything” included: sourdough served with butter creamed with the leaves of the sunburst-yellow inula flower; pine nut and red onion pie; wild-berry burrata with blackberry caviar; and focaccia made with fig-infused rapeseed oil, fresh goat’s cheese and figs.
Cascais itself is a well-heeled gem of a Lisbon outpost, 32km from the capital on the Atlantic coast. Once a summer spot for Portuguese royalty, there is still plenty of wealth in Cascais and big villas, old and new, to show for it. They surround the Paula Rego Museum: House of Stories (Casa das Histórias Paula Rego), in the upmarket Museum Quarter. Its lean, geometric aesthetic and two red concrete towers gesture to the National Palace in nearby Sintra. History is thereby invoked, as it is in Rego’s dark, subversive tales, shaped as they were by the fascist Portugal of her childhood.
I chased off thoughts of oppression with a stroll through the Marechal Carmona park across the road. Turtles swam in the pond, peacocks wandered among the statues – very cheering. I popped into the Condes de Castro de Guimarães Museum at the edge of the park. Built in 1900, the mansion is a Romantic, turreted folly showcasing Portuguese art and furniture. The sea is a stone’s throw away and there are lovely promenades in both directions. The road west leads to the wide, sandy beaches of Praia do Guincho and on to another celebration of Romanticism, the hilltop town of Sintra 18km to the north. Lord Byron, visiting in 1809, likened it to Eden.
Evening fell and it was time to feel the heat at Chefs on Fire, an annual nighttime music and culinary weekend festival in neighbouring Estoril. Chefs roasted meat on giant spits, sautéed wild mushrooms on open flames or seared seafood and the park itself had been turned into a boho hoe-down. Visitors sat on hay bales and old sofas, sipping cocktails, teenagers hung out on tree swings. Others joined strangers at trestle tables or took their sizzling plates to the live-music stage. A top, tasty night out.
The next day, back in Cascais, there were more culinary treats to come. A morning swim in the pool of my ocean-view hotel, the Cascais Miragem, and a walk through the tourist-heavy old town and along the sea battlements set me up for lunch of scallops, sea bass and a green salad at Marisco na Praça, a lively seafood restaurant popular with locals in Cascais market. I had to forego dessert in order to squeeze in our afternoon in Sintra.
Though teeming with tourists, Sintra is a Romantic theme park – take your pick of fanciful palaces and parks. We plumped for the Monserrate Palace, a Moorish Revival villa set amid terraced botanical gardens; as we were leaving, an alfresco jazz concert was about to begin. We couldn’t linger though, because we’d been told we couldn’t leave without trying a travesseiro (sweet almond pastry) at Sintra’s famous pastry shop, Parakeet II. Choose it over its big sister, Casa Piriquita, for the view from the upstairs terrace over the narrow, colourful street. You’ll see the Lord Byron Café, the poet’s face painted on the hanging sign. I gave him a little wave.
On the drive back to the hotel, we made a cliff-top pitstop at Cape Roca and watched the famous mist sweep across the sea and engulf a sailing boat. Our fact-tastic guide turned poet himself as he told us about local Colares wine made from the native Ramisco grape; how its vines are planted into the sand dunes, relying on sea mist for moisture; how these grapes become an earthy, salty red.
That night, to round off an excellent dinner of sea bream with sea urchin sauce at the Cascais Mirage hotel restaurant, we tried a bottle of Ramisco Arenæ Colares 2014 and found that, sure enough, the Atlantic coursed through our veins. Byron would approve.
Hotel Cascais Miragem has rooms with buffet breakfast from £250 per night, cascaismirage.com. This year’s Chefs on Fire (chefsonfire.pt) is on 20-21 September. For further information on Cascais, go to visitcascais.com
Article by:Source – Genevieve Fox
