About an hour from my Cascais hotel along the seashore to Estoril …
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… and proof of how fashionable this stretch was and continues to be.
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For decades Estoril has been known for gambling. A new casino opened in 1913.
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In his book The Night in Lisbon, Erich Maria Remarque, author of All Quiet on the Western Front, writes of a wartime refugee going ‘to the Casino Estoril to gamble. I still owned a good suit and they let me in’. But he lost fifty-six of his remaining sixty-two dollars.
Unfortunately a 1960s architectural disaster replaced its more atmospheric predecessor.
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The nearby 1934 Garrett Estoril is noted for its tea room.
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During the war this was a meeting spot for agents plotting over pastries. I enjoyed a mid-morning coffee. Sadly, my fellow patrons looked decidedly unexciting, but the coffee and pastry were good.
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Next to the Garrett, as war raged elsewhere in 1942, a stylish modernist post office was inaugurated.
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Still there is the original symbol of the Portuguese postal service …
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… and what looked to be unusual reflecting lights, but I was too lazy to go back when dark.
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My main Estoril goal was one of Europe’s historic hotels, the Palácio, nearly a hundred years old …
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… glamorous … even hedonistic ...
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… and at the centre of wartime intrigue.
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Nowadays it’s more into ‘wellness’.
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Next to one of the hotel’s evocative sitting rooms …
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… is a hallway is filled with memorabilia.
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Wartime guests included Jan Paderewski, Polish pianist and former prime minister …
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… writer Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, who would later die while flying a French reconnaissance aircraft …
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… and James Bond author Ian Fleming, then working for British intelligence.
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'From (Ian) Fleming’s hotel room, he could see the promenade that ran along the top of the beach from Estoril to Cascais. The beach below the promenade was littered with enemy agents. Beautiful suntanned German agents posed as Swiss neutrals in the hope of seducing Allied senior personnel who were lonely and a longways from home'. (Lisbon - War in the Shadows of the City of Light, 1939-1945, Neil Lochery, p. 127)
The April 21, 1941, LIFE magazine reported on neutral Lisbon and area dealing with the consequences of war.
'The German hangout de luxe is the Palacio Hotel in Estoril … It is a big modern resort hotel down the Tagus River from Lisbon, with a barman who mixes the best Manhattan cocktails I have tasted in Europe, and chambermaids paid by various powers.'
I’d never had a Manhattan, but this was as good a time as any. Before lunch I walked into the Palácio’s historic bar …
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… to find myself one of only three drinkers. A white coated barman devoted himself to my order and came bearing Manhattan and dish well filled with potato chips, olives and peanuts. Briefly I imagined what this quiet space would have been like from 1939 to 1945.
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Mmmmm … maybe I’ll have another …
