The king who was born and died on the same hill

A king nicknamed the African died where he was born

Afonso V of Portugal died in Sintra in 1481, in the same town where he had been born. He was forty-nine. His life had carried him across the sea and back, and it ended where it started.

Afonso V of Portugal earned his nickname, "the African," from campaigns he led in Morocco. He took Alcácer Ceguer, Arzila, and Tangier, pushing Portuguese power onto the North African coast. He was a soldier-king first, and it defined how his own century remembered him.

He was also a king who lost, once, badly. In 1476 he rode into Castile to press his own claim to that throne. He was married to his niece Joanna. He was beaten at the Battle of Toro. He crossed to France afterward, chasing an alliance that never came. He came home from that failure, too.

The palace he was born in and the palace he died in were most likely the same building. It was the Sintra National Palace, a royal seat. Kings lived there almost without a break from the early 1400s into the 1800s. Its chapel, with a Moorish latticework ceiling, may already have stood when he was a newborn there in 1432. It is 265 meters from this point, downhill from the ruined Moorish castle the Portuguese kings had taken over generations before him.

A second king closed his reign on the same ground

Afonso V was not the last king to end his reign on this same ground. Peter III of Portugal, king consort beside his niece and wife Maria I, died in Sintra in 1786. Three hundred years apart, the town took two kings the same way. It was not a place they passed through. It was the place that closed the story.

Plague killed most of Sintra's people

The same mountain air that royal families loved for its cool summers turned lethal in the 1300s. The Black Death reached Sintra and killed most of the people living there. Cold, damp weather that made the hill pleasant for kings helped the plague travel faster through the town below the palace. The building that had cradled Afonso a hundred years later stood through a century where survival, not succession, was the news on this hill.

A hired general ended his career dying in Sintra

Not every death here belonged to a native king. Christian August was a Prince of Waldeck and Pyrmont. He was born in Germany. He built his career as a soldier for hire. He commanded armies for Austria. Then he commanded armies for Portugal. He ended it in Sintra, dying there in 1798. He had no Portuguese blood and no claim on the throne kept in the Sintra National Palace down the hill. The town took him anyway, the way it had taken Afonso and Pedro before him.

A duchess and artist died on this hill

Maria Luísa de Sousa Holstein was born into one of Portugal's grandest noble houses, the Palmela family. She spent her life as an artist. She was a patron of charitable work. She held the title of 3rd Duchess of Palmela. Like the soldier-prince before her, she was not born on this ground. She came here to end her life, dying in Sintra in 1909, more than four centuries after Afonso first drew breath in the same town.

Twenty-five soldiers were killed fighting a mountain fire

On September 7, 1966, a forest fire broke out in the Serra de Sintra. This wooded ridge rises behind the palace where Afonso was born and died. Twenty-five soldiers from the Antiaerial Artillery Regiment of Queluz were sent to fight it. The fire surrounded them on the slope at Alto do Monge. All twenty-five were killed by the flames. The same high ground that had drawn a five-century line of kings, princes, and duchesses to their deaths took twenty-five conscripted soldiers in a single afternoon.