Lisbon Escape: Sunset Sailing, Cascais and Fairytale Sintra

From Zurich, we flew to Lisbon – a city that captures you within the first few steps. Not with a skyline or sheer size, but with details: the ornate cobblestone mosaics underfoot, the tiled facades, the steep lanes where you keep stopping because yet another view opens up between two buildings.

Lisbon is best explored on foot – even if the hills turn it into a workout. Alfama, Baixa, Belém, Bairro Alto – each neighborhood has its own character, and in between the famous Tram 28 rattles through streets that really shouldn’t be wide enough for it.

One evening, we booked a catamaran cruise at sunset – and it turned out to be one of the highlights of the trip. From the water, you see Lisbon from a perspective you’d never get on land. The Ponte 25 de Abril stretches across the Tagus, and yes – the resemblance to the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco is striking, you’re not imagining it. On the opposite bank stands the Cristo Rei statue with outstretched arms, immediately reminiscent of Rio de Janeiro. In a single evening, Lisbon delivers images you’d normally fly halfway around the world for.

For a day trip, we drove to Cascais on the coast and continued to Cabo da Roca – the westernmost point of mainland Europe. You stand on the cliffs, nothing ahead but the Atlantic, and you genuinely feel like you’re standing at the edge of something.

On the way back, we stopped in Sintra. And Sintra is hard to describe, because it looks like someone made it up. Colorful palaces on forested hills, led by the Palácio da Pena – half Moorish, half Romantic, entirely surreal. Like a fairy-tale castle dropped into a misty forest.