📝 Five years later, we had proper vacations!
Five years later, we finally had proper vacations! 🎉 We chose the northern interior part of Alentejo because we had a voucher that covered most of the hotel cost, and we could use it to spend a few nights in the monastery of Crato, a breathtaking place that looks more like a castle.
I highly recommend it if you want to spend some days in that area and can afford the prices. It even has a museum there that you can visit.
We only ended up staying one night because Chico, our cat, has some abandonment trauma, and we knew he would be stressed out while we were away. He had my parents to look out for him, and he's very comfortable around them, but he spent most of the time in the downstairs living room, where he usually spends very little time, switching between couches, waiting for us to come home, sometimes crying, and barely eating. 😿
Even if we only had two days to visit the area, and we wanted to go to the villages of Castelo de Vide and Marvão, we managed to find some spots with stunning views! 🤩 Some were plains, some were mountainous areas, but all were chef's kiss.
The Roman Museum of Ammaia, in Marvão, is also worth a visit. The outside part is bare, but it has some cool stuff in the interior exhibit. It's just a shame I couldn't touch anything behind glass. 😭 I wanted to touch an amphora and some coins so much! I'm not joking!
We did have issues finding a place to eat. Most of the restaurants in the center of each village were closed, even some that were suggested to me, and the few they had open had long queues. It's better to try and find something in the outskirts of the villages; you'll have slightly more options and far shorter waiting queues, if any.
Overall, even if exhausting, especially in Marvão, where you have to walk on foot to go up to the castle, you have several cool places to visit.
Speaking of exhausting, I was cursing so much as I was walking to Marvão's castle, because it was making my legs feel like they were being ripped apart, that several other tourists, especially the Portuguese and Spanish ones, looked at me in a bit of a shock. That actually ended up making me laugh and helped me slightly distract from that insane pain.
This was out of character for me because, in a normal situation, I wouldn't subject myself to this. But the wife was super excited about this, so I chose to try and tough it up, knowing I would pay for it later. Well, I'm paying for it hard, but I don't regret it. Even I needed this!
All the photos here are mine. You can use them under the CC0 License.