The Portugal Festival webpage Enjoying the Region also has some basic sightseeing info on Cascais / Estoril / Sintra with a link, and a link for more info about Lisbon.
"Let me start by stating the obvious: our travel preferences and perceptions of a place can be vastly different than anyone else. With that caveat, [my husband] and I spoke this morning and we liked Morocco a lot. The desert, markets, people, food, color, sights and sounds are vastly superior to Portugal. It is from our perspective a lot more interesting place to visit [than Portugal]. We travel for the culture of the place and people. If you want to do both countries, wander in Lisbon for a day. I think there will be time during Festival to wander in Cascais. Recall most of the old historic buildings in Portugal were destroyed in 1755 earthquake.There was also a recent article in the Seattle Times about visiting Morocco titled Wandering through Morocco’s ancient and timeless medinas that features Marrakesh, Fes and Chefchaouen.
One week is tight to do both countries. Travel time will eat up some of that time. Ideally I would go to Marrekesh. Amazing market teaming with stalls, people selling fresh baked breads, naan, mounds of spices, and bedouins come in from desert to sell stuff and everything else. Charming places to stay. We stayed in a Riad, which are lovely apartments facing outdoor garden courtyards. where you dine at night on tangine. You can camp out in the dessert and walk the sand dunes. We sat at night on top of sand dunes and watched the celestial show. Talk about feeling like peace on earth. Yes, I even road on a camel! We also drove thru the Atlas Mountains. Lovely and spectacular scenery. We went to Essouria on the ocean. Nice fishing village.
Portugal is lovely. But we liked Morocco more. Is it touristy? yes, very few places left on earth without tourists."
From a man ín our community who lived in Portugal for 3 years and speaks Portuguese (and has offered to translate for us at the Festival):
"The drive down the [Portugal] coast is best done leisurely over the course of a day. So many pretty sights and good food on the way. Especially in the Allentejo region - in particular the town of Vila Nova de Milfontes on the coast. I've never been to Morocco so I can't speak to it, but plan for a day drive each way just to get to the south of Portugal and back to Lisbon. Definitely fun stuff to do in Lisbon, and I highly recommend Sintra, which is worth a day or two excursion, and is minutes away from Cascais (pronounced Kahs-KIESH, where the 'ie' sounds like a long I sound)." [Note: the new Temple is in Sintra, and the Festival is going to run tours there - MW.]From two Sangha travelers who have been to Spain:
"We went for a total of 10 days and covered a lot of the country but staying south this was what we did:***
Ronda is a beautiful small cliff side town. It is one of the oldest cities in Spain we stayed 2 nights in a hotel that looked over the cliff and got to explore the city on foot. Very charming! Granada was very nice as well we didn't stay there over night we pretty much visited Alhambra had lunch and moved on but I am sure there is much to discover there as well. Cordoba was another town we only did a day trip. The architecture here was like walking through history that reflects the different cultures that left their marks. Seville is nice, it is much bigger then the other towns. We saw a great flamenco show and I would recommend going to one. I like to get guided tours for any monuments or museums to get an accurate and full history of them."
"I think overall it's a good idea to be somewhat focused in where youNote that Spain is having big economic problems that you can read about in the news, but a nurse I talked to whose boyfriend was there 3 months ago, said that it was fine for tourists, for what that's worth.
want to go, Spain is actually really big. Here are some of my
impressions.
Andalusia - the 3 "biggies" are Granada, Cordoba, and Sevilla. They all have wonderful aspects, if you want to focus on Andalusia, this could take up your 9 days.
Here is what we loved about these 3 places :
Granada - the Alhambra
Cordoba - La Mezquita, and Roman ruins
Sevilla - overall the most beautiful of the 3, there is a museum of
flamenco there with free performances. My impression of Sevilla is that it is a very strong cultural experience of Andalusia, lots of tile murals around the city, best tapas and jerez (sherry) that we found.
There is a Kadampa Hotel [now a KMC with places Sangha can stay] in Alhaurin el Grande .... It is in the hills outside of Malaga, we found it nice to get out of the busy cities for a while. One can make day trips from there, we went swimming on the coast one day in Fuengirola, and Alhaurin el Grande is charming and not over-touristy, Migas is a small, charming, but touristy town nearby. One can also make a day trip to Ronda, which we didn't do, but which I wish we had, it's supposed to be beautiful. We also took a day trip to Cordoba to see la Mezquita (historic mosque turned Catholic cathedral), it's a 2-hour drive one way from the Kadampa [Centre]. ...
Spring and Fall are the best times to see Andalusia, as there are often festivals during these seasons which sound really fun (we were there in the summer - hot, hot, hot). These festivals can be fabulous cultural experiences, if you are at all interested in this, you may want to check on the internet and see if there is one in one of the cities that you can schedule your time around. [See Rick Steves' list, which includes All Saints' Day all over Spain on Nov 1, 2012, which involves closures, and Virgen de la Almudena in Madrid on Nov 9, 2013, which is a major holiday]. Madrid, of course, is huge, there is tons to do there, its gorgeous, and it's a busy, busy city. We stayed in el Centro, went to El Prado to see works by Velazquez (of course), El Greco, Goya, etc. and El Museo de La Reina Sofia - home of Picasso's "Guernica." We took side trips to Avila (mostly of interest if one is Catholic as it is the home of Teresa of Avila, though it has the 2nd biggest stone wall in the world next to the great wall of China - the medieval walls around the city). Also went to Segovia know for impressive Roman aqueduct and castle that was one of Isabel & Ferdinand's palaces.
When we drove south from Madrid through the Castilla/La Mancha region we visited Consuegra, a small town where one can see the traditional wind mills of Don Quixote fame. We then stayed a couple days in Toledo. Toledo is fabulous, the main city is inside medieval walls, it's the home of El Greco so many of his fans visit there. Traditional arts of sword making and suit of armor making, ceramics, and marzipan are very much alive there. It was also the place where the Inquisition started, so that's kind of yucky, but it's also an interesting place to see how the 3 Abrahamic faiths existed in one place. We enjoyed seeing the Sepphardic Museum and the Cathedral (Cristopher Columbus's tomb is in there). Toledo has lots of tourists, but it's off the beaten path for Americans. However, that gets me to another point - [my husband] speaks Spanish so we got around pretty well. We did find that hardly anybody speaks English in Spain, and in smaller towns and places off the beaten path, the vast majority of people have never even met an American. So... unless you are quite bold, sticking to more touristy locales may be a good strategy, as people will at least be used to tourists.
Barcelona - again is a fabulous place to see, but one needs a chunk of time to really enjoy it. It's also really far away, we ended up flying there from Granada, the drive would have been about 6 hours (p.s. flights were cheaper and faster than trains). It's also a distinctly different cultural experience, the traditional Catalan language and culture is in the middle of a revival. Which is cool, though there is definitely ethnic tension there with Spanish culture, and even if you do speak Spanish, many Catalans won't speak it with you. But if you love Gaudi architecture, Joan Miro, and Picasso, it's a place you want to see. It comes across as a very modern city, mixed with it's ancient heritage. But it seemed a bit more 'dangerous' in terms of pickpockets than even Madrid.
We also took a couple days and went on a ferry from Tarifa to Tangiers, Morocco. A fabulous side trip, but would take time out of your other stuff."
It's always good to check the U.S. Government's Travel Advisory website before going anywhere; none of these countries is currently on the list. There are also links to safety and health tips for traveling abroad. I also have separate blog posts about Safety Tips and Medical and Health Tips.
Recommendations from other sources:
Portugal
Rick Steves' Portugal
GoLisbon's Where to Go in Portugal
Lonely Planet's Portugal
Rough Guide's Where to Go in Portugal
TimeOut's Best of Portugal
Morocco
Rick Steves' Morocco: Plunge Deep
Lonely Planet's Morocco
Rough Guide's Morocco
Spain
Rick Steves' Spain
Rough Guide's Spain
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