Category: Hotels
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Kruger | I Know I'm Going That Way
“"The universal is the local without walls. It is the authentic that can be seen from all sides, and on all sides it is right, like the truth." Miguel Torga. A small dog can survive hunger, a colonial empire, a rough road, and more than a tumultuous century, as long as someone…
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Johannesburg | A Long Walk
“There’s nothing like returning to a place that remains the same to discover how much we’ve changed.” Nelson Mandela. It was to the sound of a national anthem that Johannesburg ceased to fit into what I’m about to tell you. At the Steyn City Clubhouse, amidst a lavish meal, a Springboks game, a fine South African Sauvignon Blanc…
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Convento do Espinheiro | With Absolute Certainty, Perhaps
“A God is born. Others die. Truth neither came nor went: Error changed. We now have another Eternity, And what has passed was always better. Blind, Science tills the useless soil. Mad, Faith lives the dream of its worship. A new God is just a word. Do not seek nor believe: everything…”
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Herdade da Rocha | The Slow Art of Being Rooted
“We all want a place in the sun, I think that’s perfectly normal, my boy. However, I think you should then make the sun instead of trying to earn the place.” Jean Giono. When we read The Man Who Planted Trees, by Jean Giono, we quickly realize that the true protagonist is not Elzéard Bouffier, the solitary shepherd who passes by…
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The Lynx Santa Clara & Hidden | The Liturgy of the Gesture
“The beauty of the cosmos is given not only by unity in variety, but also by variety in unity.” Umberto Eco. In Umberto Eco's *The Name of the Rose*, the monastery is not just a setting, it is a character. Each corridor, each stained-glass window, each old book in the dim light of the library, each shadow cast by the bars of the icy windows, compose…
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Maison Albar Amoure | Sofia's eternity painted by Bia
“In Minho, the land sings and the green is a promise of eternity.” Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen. Eternity, that concept as vast as it is unattainable, is rarely touched. Generally, we associate it with gods, physics, or the stars that seem motionless in the sky. But Sophia dared to locate it here, among us, in the land that…
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Quinta São José do Barrilário | The whole soul in the baggage that doesn't scream
“"Perhaps we are not made to live in one place. Perhaps we are made to leave." Paolo Cognetti, The Eight Mountains. What The Eight Mountains teaches us, with a mountainous and harsh delicacy, is that there is a secret geography in what we seek, and that it almost never has to do with the final destination. The novel by…
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Maison Albar Le Monumental Palace and Le Monument | The omniscient narrator
“The true voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.” Marcel Proust. There are books that teach us to look at the world differently. In “Time Regained,“ the last volume of “In Search of Lost Time,” Marcel Proust concludes his monumental work with a reflection on…
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Oslo, Bergen and Hvitsten | The Voice Before the Sound
“I was walking with two friends along a road. The sun was setting, I felt a breath of melancholy, suddenly the sky turned blood red. I stopped, leaned against the fence, dead tired. I looked at the clouds in flames that hung like blood and swords over the dark blue fjord and the city, my friends continued on, but…”
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Christmas Wine Experience 2026 | Winter as an embrace
“There are two ways to spread light: to be the candle or the mirror that reflects it.” Edith Wharton. There are stories that return every year not because the calendar summons them, but because they carry within them a kind of intimate truth about who we are. The story of Saint Nicholas, long before he became the figure…