Five Feet, Nine Inches Above Ground

Welcome back to Estoi: Sunday January 19, 2025

It’s more than half-past January and I have been in Estoi a total of 24 hours. It’s wonderful to be here again and renew acquaintances and begin revisiting old haunts and make plans to visit new sites.

Quinta Pé da Cruz is once again my home for the next 60 days. Today was recover from jet lag time: my body and mind need to get together on what time and day it is! So, it was a putter around the home patch and finally take a relaxed stroll around the village.

Estoi is a place where change happens incrementally at a snail’s pace except for the times when it doesn’t. Didn’t see any exceptional changes today.

The Pousada gardens, now under the control of a hotel that was once the palatial home of a local landlord, were open to the public. So I had a stroll around the grounds imagining what it must have been like in the late 18th early 19th century when it was built by the Viscount of Estoi.

The design of the garden is based on the Versaille gardens and was likely intended to provide the Palace with food. That part of the garden is currently fallow and the orange crop from last year is falling off the trees. Incidentally, I learned that leaving them there is the best and least expensive method of storing the fruit. There is also a tea pavilion that I will have to feature in another post!

And that’s it for today. The fire is on, food and libations are underway as a gentle rain falls outside. A wonderful beginning to my winter sojourn in Portugal for which I am truly thankful.