Our old driver/friend Jorge picked us up at 9:30 for a day in the country away from crowded, metropolitan Lisbon. We had two objectives for the day: another palace/monastery (1), and another vinyard/winery. As it turned out, both were different than we had seen before.

The first stop was Mafra. This was built from 1717 to 1755 under orders from King John V as a suburban country home, about 18 miles from Lisbon. We should all have weekend homes this big. The total size of the building is 40,000 square meters, or approximately 430,000 square feet, or almost 10 acres. We walked about 1.2 miles during our tour of the part of the building that was the royal palace. The monastery, other sections and the courtyards were not accessible

to tourists. The heating bill would have been extraordinary, except that the building didn’t seem to have any heating system. No fireplaces, no heating ducts.

In the pictures above, notice how little of the palace the upper picture shows compared to the scale model in the lower picture.

The first stop on the tour was the infirmary which served the monastery (2). There was an entire section of the building devoted to this, with its own kitchen, chapel and medical ward. The medical ward was very advanced for the time (perhaps for our time as well), featuring cubicals for each patient and large overhead windows to bring in light.

You’ll recall my description of our somewhat disappointing visit to the Palace at Monserrate almost two weeks ago. That building, while quite nicely designed, was devoid of any furniture. This made the way we experienced the building devoid of any feeling. Mafra, on the other hand, is full of period furniture, much of which had been used in the Palace. Sally was particularly intrigued by some of the pieces which were early versions of some pieces we had in our old New Jersey home.

We went through dozens of rooms in the living quarters of the Palace. I’ll just show four rooms.

Clockwise from upper left:

• The bed where the last King of Portugal, Manuel II, spent the last night of his reign before fleeing to exile in England.
• The King’s royal bed
• A receiving room for the King
• Throne room.

The Palace had an enormous library, consisting of 30,000 volumes. It’s not clear if any of the Kings ever read them all.

We spent a good hour and a half in Mafra Palace. It was very impressive, and pretty interesting.

After stopping for a not very good lunch at a restaurant with a very good view by the sea, we went on to a private winery visit. The Quinta de Chocapalha winery is a family run business, with the parents and several of their children active in running the vineyard and making the wine. We’ve been to any number of wineries, including earlier on this trip, but this was a first in two regards: it was just the two of us with Alice Tavares, one of the owners, and it was the first time we managed to be there as the grapes were being brought in from the fields. We were able to watch the stems being removed as the first step before crushing.

Previous spread, top to bottom, left to right:

• Alice Tavares confers with a master winemaker holding a beaker of sulfides as the grapes are brought in and prepared to be crushed;
• Moving wine between steel tanks;
• Paulo Tavares supervising the grape transfer;
• Wine being aged in oak from 6 – 18 months;
• Wine showroom.

After watching everyone doing their jobs, Alice took us down to her house where we sat on the patio while she let us taste, and tried to sell us, some wines. The wine was nice, sitting in the shade overlooking the vineyards was relaxing, and the selling was hard. We declined to buy any. We could only carry home two bottles, and shipping was exorbitant – it started at $27/bottle for six bottles, and dropped to $17/bottle for three cases. This is for wines that sell for EUR 10 to 25 per bottle. It is available in the US, and we might try some if we can find it when we get home.

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(1) Confusingly, this building is referred to in the same Wikipedia article as sometimes a convent, and sometimes a monastery. I’m gonna stick with monastery.

(2) I assume that the royal family would be treated in their own quarters by their own physicians, although this was not mentioned on the tour.