Fairytale palaces in the Atlantic hills — Pena Palace, travesseiros, and a UNESCO town
Sintra is a small mountain town 28km from Lisbon that UNESCO designated a Cultural Landscape in 1995 for its extraordinary concentration of Romantic-era palaces — the candy-coloured Pena Palace, the mystical Quinta da Regaleira with its Initiation Well, and the ruined Moorish Castle above the pine forest. The food is equally compelling: travesseiros (flaky puff pastry filled with almond-egg cream) at Casa Piriquita, and queijadas de Sintra (small cheese tarts made to a recipe unchanged since 1756).
Sintra's mild, misty climate and dramatic granite peaks drew both Moorish rulers and Portuguese royalty to build here for over a millennium. The Moors established a castle on the highest peak by the 9th century CE; after the Christian Reconquista in 1147, the Portuguese kings used Sintra as a summer retreat, building the National Palace in the 14th century (the two conical chimneys remain its most distinctive feature). The 19th century saw an explosion of Romantic-era construction under King Ferdinand II, who transformed a ruined monastery into the fantastical Pena Palace between 1842–1854, m…