Cultural Landscape of Sintra
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How it came to be
In the hills of Sintra in Portugal stands a castle used during the Moorish occupation in the 9th century. It was abandoned after the Reconquista and its ruins remain on a peak. The buildings of the town's Royal Palace date from the early 15th and early 16th centuries.
A chapel to the Virgin had stood on the hilltop since the Middle Ages, and Manuel I built a Hieronymite monastery there. The Lisbon earthquake of 1755 reduced it to ruins. In 1838 Ferdinand II, consort of Queen Maria II, acquired the monastery, the surrounding land and the Moorish castle, and turned the ruin into the Pena Palace, mixing Gothic, Egyptian, Moorish and Renaissance elements. The palace was finished in 1854, with a park of some 200 hectares planted with trees from North America, Asia and New Zealand.
In the 19th century Sintra became the first centre of European Romantic architecture. The Palace of Monserrate, designed by James Knowles Junior for Francis Cook, joined neo-Gothic forms with elements of Indian architecture. Sintra was inscribed as a cultural landscape in 1995.
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