The History of Sintra Portugal

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A thousand years of people deciding this hillside was worth the effort — and the earthquake that made its most famous building possible.

Sintra is a thousand years of people deciding this particular hillside was worth the effort, and a sintra guided tour is still the quickest way to make sense of the result. Moorish garrisons, Portuguese kings, an English merchant, a German-born prince consort and a Brazilian-Portuguese millionaire all built here, and all of them for different reasons.

Before the fortress — the Serra as a landmark

The Serra de Sintra is the first high ground a ship sees approaching Lisbon from the Atlantic, and the last a ship leaving it loses. That made it a marker long before it was a place to live. Roman-era remains have been found across the hills, and the Greeks are said to have called it the Mountain of the Moon.

The mountain also does something no other hill on this coast does: it catches Atlantic moisture and makes its own climate. Everything built here since has depended on that fact.

The Moorish ridge, 8th to 12th centuries

Moorish builders fortified the ridge in the 8th and 9th centuries. The castle they put there was not a residence — it was a lookout and a refuge, watching the coast and the road into Lisbon.

What survives is the outline: walls following the contour of the rock, towers at the high points, and a cistern. The community that lived below it left its mark on the farming, the water management and the place names that are still in use.

1147 — the fall of Lisbon and a Christian Sintra

Lisbon fell to Afonso Henriques in October 1147 with the help of a passing crusader fleet. Sintra surrendered shortly afterwards, and the ridge changed hands without a siege.

The Portuguese crown kept it. Within two centuries the settlement below the old fortress was a royal town, and the fortress itself began its long career as a picturesque ruin rather than a defence.

A royal summer, 14th to 18th centuries

The National Palace is the physical record of this period. Portuguese kings extended it across four centuries, and the two conical chimneys over its kitchens — 33 metres tall, visible from the whole valley — became the town's signature.

Sintra worked as a summer court because of the microclimate: a cool, watered hillside within a day's ride of Lisbon. The habit of building here for the summer, rather than for defence or trade, is the thread that runs to everything that followed.

1755 — the earthquake that made Pena possible

In 1503 King Manuel I founded a Hieronymite monastery on the highest peak of the Serra. It stood for 250 years. The Lisbon earthquake of 1 November 1755 reduced it to a chapel and a cloister inside a ruin.

Nobody rebuilt it. That abandonment is precisely why the site was available, cheap and unencumbered eighty years later — and why the most photographed building in Portugal has a 16th-century cloister at its heart.

Ferdinand II and the Romantic invention of Sintra, 1838 to 1854

Ferdinand of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, king consort of Portugal, bought the ruin in 1838. He worked with Wilhelm Ludwig von Eschwege, a German mining engineer, and built between 1842 and 1854 — largely finished by 1847.

What they made was not a restoration. Neo-Gothic, neo-Manueline and neo-Moorish elements were assembled into one building and painted in strong colour, and the surrounding hillside was planted with species from four continents. UNESCO's citation names this as the first centre of European Romantic architecture. Ferdinand did not copy a style; he started one.

Byron's ‘glorious Eden’ and the foreign estates

Byron reached Sintra in 1809 and wrote it into Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, and the town has been trading on the phrase ever since. What followed was more consequential than the poetry: wealthy foreigners started buying hillside.

Francis Cook, an English textile merchant, rebuilt Monserrate from 1858 and planted a botanical garden across its valley. Fifty years later António Carvalho Monteiro bought four hectares below the town and hired the opera set designer Luigi Manini to build Quinta da Regaleira between 1904 and 1910. Both estates exist because Sintra had become a place where building something strange was the expected thing to do.

1910 to today — from royal property to World Heritage

The revolution of October 1910 ended the monarchy. Queen Amélia spent her last night in Portugal at Pena before leaving for exile, and the palace was classified a national monument and turned into a museum.

Quinta da Regaleira stayed in private hands until the town council bought it in 1997 and opened it in June 1998. In 1995 UNESCO inscribed the Cultural Landscape of Sintra — 946 hectares, with a buffer zone nearly four times that — as the first European site listed in the cultural-landscape category.

The palaces and castles of Sintra covers each building in detail, things to do in Sintra covers the town and the coast, and Sintra Portugal Tours lists the guided tours that put it all in one day.