The village of palace-crowned hills — Romanticism's greatest architectural playground above the Atlantic
Sintra is a UNESCO World Heritage Site 30km west of Lisbon, where the Serra de Sintra mountains are so improbably studded with eccentric Romanticist palaces that it looks like a fairy tale illustration. The Pena Palace (a riot of yellow and red turrets above the clouds), the Moorish Castle, Quinta da Regaleira (a garden of secret tunnels and Templar symbolism), and the Monserrate Palace each occupy their own hill. Lord Byron called Sintra 'perhaps in every respect the most delightful in Europe.'
Sintra's hills were sacred to the Celts; the Moors built a castle here in the 8th century. It became the summer retreat of Portuguese royalty from the 13th century, and the existing National Palace (with its two distinctive conical kitchen chimneys) dates from the 15th century. The 19th century Romantic period transformed the hills — King Ferdinand II commissioned Pena Palace (1854) and wealthy aristocrats built Monserrate and Quinta da Regaleira in a frenzy of neo-Gothic, neo-Manueline, and neo-Islamic architectural eclecticism. UNESCO inscribed the Cultural Landscape in 1995.