But before I go further into Byron’s connection with Sintra, I should explain my own longtime obsession with walking in the footsteps of Lord Byron. And funny enough, it’s connected to an insight I had on the Camino in 2024, because that was where I discovered that my first pilgrimage was actually in 1997. So it seemed right to begin this journey in a place that shaped Byron’s imagination, inspiring his own Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage.

My fascination began a year after college, when I backpacked across Europe for four months with my newlywed husband Darryl, traveling off the grid with a Eurail pass and a guidebook during the age before cell phones, Google Maps, and online travel blogs. I was an English literature major, so our itinerary often turned into a literary treasure hunt. In Switzerland, I dragged Darryl to the Prison of Chillon, a place Byron also immortalized, then across Lake Geneva to find Villa Diodati, where Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein during that famous Gothic vacation. In England we toured Byron’s ancestral home at Newstead Abbey, visited Wordsworth’s Dove Cottage in the Lake District, and I nearly cried when I saw the cliffs of Dover. I often thought, wouldn’t it be great if there were a literary travel guide? In those days, you really had to search out these more obscure places.

Over the years, it became a running joke in my family that I always “accidentally” stumble upon Byron or Shelley sites during my travels. Last year, on a day trip from Lucca to the Bay of Poets along the Ligurian Coast, I tracked down the unmarked former home of the Shelleys in the small village of San Terenzo. I stood at its doorway, looking out over the same stretch of water where Shelley’s boat overturned in a sudden storm. I was overcome with a solemn feeling as I stood in the very place where he once lived, and where the sea finally claimed him.

Later, Shelley was cremated in a private ceremony on a quiet beach near Viareggio. Byron stood beside the burning remains, and the long-told rumor claims that he reached into the fading embers to save the poet’s heart just before it disintegrated into ashes. The truth of the moment is impossible to know, but the image endures, and it has stayed with me, carrying the sense of how these Romantic lives touched the very landscapes I now walk.

I remember my college days in the 1990s, when my eccentric Savannah friend Shannon Scott hosted a Shelley birthday gathering outside the Gallery Espresso, complete with a red velvet cake in the shape of Shelley’s heart, lit up with flaming sparklers flickering in the night, as we recited famous lines in homage to the dead poet. One year for my birthday, Shannon gave me earrings with Byron’s portrait on them. I brought them along for this trip knowing I would have occasion to wear them in Sintra. I suppose fancy poet jewelry could be considered a luxury item for a Camino walking pilgrim. But to me they were a necessity.

While walking the Camino Frances in 2024, I listened to Phil Cousineau’s The Art of Pilgrimage and realized that I have always been a pilgrim. Not necessarily the religious variety but the type that seeks out inspiration and reflection. Sometimes this is simply being in nature, feeling the presence of those who stood in the same place before, leaving an invisible mark for future people to walk over. Or peeking through a doorway toward the sea where a poet once lived and died. On each trip to Europe, I seem to seek out these places, nostalgia guiding me through my travels in some memento mori kind of way. And here in Sintra was another such journey.

In Sintra, I kept thinking about how Byron arrived after a dramatic escape from Lisbon, where a furious husband supposedly confronted him outside a theatre. He and his friend Hobhouse fled to the cool refuge of these hills. Byron settled briefly into Lawrence’s Hotel, supposedly right next door to the very room where I slept in the Eden Room. The creaking wooden floors, old portraits, a library full of Byron books, quiet corners lit by soft lamps and a warm fire, everything felt touched by the past.

He spent his days wandering the cork tree forests and climbing the winding paths toward the Moorish Castle and the ruined monastery that would later become Pena Palace. We followed in his footsteps and moved slowly through the same luminous landscape that stirred him so deeply. His stay was short, yet his response to Sintra’s forests and ruins shaped some of the most memorable passages in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage and helped transform this quiet village into a Romantic legend for generations of travelers, including me.

I spent my two days in Sintra wandering the same hills and forest paths Byron once described. The breeze moved through the trees in a way that made time feel blurred. I stopped often at the funny little Lord Byron Café, where Byron-themed postcards and other touristy relics appeared throughout the décor. It felt like a small sanctuary for those who still treasure his celebrity-like afterlife.

Most travel guides suggest only a day trip, rushing through the village and its palaces in a single afternoon. That felt sacrilegious. If Byron found the village worthy of such devotion, how could I justify visiting for only a few hours? Once I learned that Lawrence’s Hotel was still in existence, I booked two nights so we could take our time and let the place reveal itself the way it once did to him, a Glorious Eden, in his famous lines from Childe Harold:

“Lo, Cintra’s glorious Eden intervenes / in variegated maze of mount and glen.”

For me, this was more than a sightseeing stop before walking the Camino Portuguese. It was a return to the part of myself that has always searched for meaning in landscapes, stories, and the echoes of those who walked before me. A Byron pilgrimage, yes, but also a reminder that I have been a pilgrim all along.

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Since completing my first Camino de Santiago in June 2024 (the LONG one) I have wanted to return. Truthfully, it never really ended. Even walking 100 KM of the Via Francigena in Tuscany last summer was just a tease. A part of my soul craves daily guidance from little yellow arrows and bronze shells, directing me toward the destination. I like having a purpose, a direction. Controlled freedom. Being present in the moment, with others, in nature, in the redundant rhythm of the daily routine of waking, resting, eating, drinking, sharing, observing, more walking. Meeting other pilgrims on the trail, exactly where we are. Simplicity.

The lessons keep unfolding back home, reminding me that I am not in control of most things that I used to think I was back when I believed I was the boss. A shaman in Baja told me I am still a boss. I said “Bullshit, I’m retired. In fact, my desk plaque even says. “AMY GASTER - I AM NOT THE BOSS.” A reminder and a warning.

And now I am experimenting with a life more centered on BEING instead of DOING - while I still find the need to do things. Like “doing” another Camino. But, it’s actually NOT doing. It’s being. Now isn’t that funny! Either way, it’s calling me again.

This is Amy’s Substack.

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