A Moorish hilltop fortress, now a ruin
The Castle of the Moors is a hilltop fortress above Sintra, Portugal, built by North African Moors in the 8th or 9th century to guard roads to Lisbon, Cascais and Mafra. Its 450-metre walls, a rock-cut cistern and a medieval chapel survive, and the site has been a UNESCO World Heritage anchor since 1995.
Moors built walls that still guard the Sintra roads
The Castle of the Moors is a hilltop fortress, now left as a ruin open to visitors. Its walls still run about 450 meters along the ridge above Sintra. Moors built it in the 8th and 9th centuries, using granite and limestone laid in a technique called mixtum vittatum. The fortress protected a farming community below and controlled the roads linking Sintra to Lisbon, Mafra, and Cascais. A cistern cut into the rock held around 600 cubic meters of rainwater. It kept supplying the town of Sintra into the 20th century.
In 1093, King Afonso VI of León took Sintra from Moorish rule. The Moors briefly won it back before his forces sacked it again sixteen years later. Local tradition holds that Norwegian crusaders under King Sigurd I attacked the castle in 1109 on their way to the Holy Land. The story goes that the garrison was killed after refusing to convert to Christianity.
The garrison surrendered without a fight in 1147
In 1147, Afonso Henriques, Portugal's first king, took the castle after his conquest of Lisbon. The Moorish garrison surrendered without a fight. Afonso Henriques settled thirty defenders inside the walls and granted them a charter in 1154. He built the Chapel of São Pedro de Penaferrim inside the fortress, Sintra's first Christian church. A Christian cemetery grew up beside it over the next three centuries. Archaeologists later dug up more than thirty graves there between 2009 and 2013.
The castle emptied out as the town grew below it. A fire wrecked its central tower in 1636. The 1755 earthquake finished the job, leaving the fortifications in ruins for nearly a century before anyone tried to fix them.
Archaeologists uncovered an Islamic quarter and medieval graves
Archaeologists began digging through the site in 1976. They found traces of daily life in what is now called the Islamic Quarter, along with the medieval graves beside the chapel. The work continued in phases for decades, filling in details the earthquake and the centuries had erased. In 1995, UNESCO named the Sintra Cultural Landscape a World Heritage Site, with the castle as one of its anchors. It was the first cultural landscape UNESCO had named anywhere in Europe.
An old chapel now tells the castle's story
Since 2000, the company Parques de Sintra - Monte da Lua has managed the castle for the state. In 2015, the old chapel reopened as an interpretation center, telling the site's history to visitors standing where the congregation once stood. The cistern Ferdinand's workers cleared out still holds rainwater, channeled down through stone ventilation shafts the Moors built more than a thousand years ago. It kept Sintra's taps running into the early 20th century.
The castle keeps the layered name tourists still ask about. Guides elsewhere in Portugal tell similar stories about their own "Castelo dos Mouros," at Arnóia and Mau Vizinho among them, legends that Moorish families once held those hills too. Here the history needs no legend. The Moors built it, held it, and lost it, and the walls say so plainly enough.
The walls still climb the ridge above Sintra, open to the sky, with the cistern and chapel standing inside them.
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