A medieval royal palace, now a museum

A Moorish fortress became a Portuguese royal palace

The Sintra National Palace sits here, now a historic house museum open to visitors. Its twin conical chimneys, each over 100 feet tall, rise above the old town of Sintra. The palace stands on ground once held by Moorish governors of the Taifa of Lisbon. In 1147, King Afonso Henriques took Sintra from its Moorish rulers and claimed the site for the Portuguese Crown. Historians credit the old chapel to King Dinis in the 1300s, and little else from that early fortress survives. The palace as it now looks began to take shape under King João I, who started a major rebuilding campaign around 1415. João I's workers raised the courtyard called the Ala Joanina, along with the kitchens and their two giant chimneys. His son Duarte I loved the place and wrote a detailed account of its rooms. Duarte's son Afonso V was born here in 1432 and died here in 1481, in the same room. His successor, João II, was acclaimed king within these walls.

A new building campaign began under Manuel I, funded by wealth from Portugal's age of ocean exploration. Between about 1497 and 1530, he added the Manueline Wing and the Sala dos Brasões, the Coat of Arms Room. Its domed ceiling carries the painted shields of 72 noble Portuguese families. He also had the palace retiled with colorful Spanish ceramics, many still on the walls today.

King Afonso VI inherited the throne as a boy and grew up erratic and violent, by most contemporary accounts unfit to rule. Pedro kept Afonso locked inside the Sintra National Palace for the rest of his life. Afonso never left these walls again. He died here in September 1683, still a prisoner in his own family's palace.

The Lisbon earthquake of 1755 struck Sintra hard. A tower over the Arab Room came down, and other parts of the palace cracked and shifted. Workers restored it in the old style, keeping its medieval look rather than rebuilding it fashionably. Queen Maria I later redecorated the rooms of the Manueline Wing. Through these repairs, the Moorish fountain still ran at the center of the Arab Room, and its Mudéjar tile work, imported from Seville, stayed largely in place. Visitors can still see tiles laid with cuenca technique showing the armillary sphere, Manuel I's personal symbol, worked into the walls so densely that no bare plaster shows, a Moorish decorating habit the Portuguese kept.

Queen Mother Maria Pia made the palace her summer home late in the monarchy. Maria Pia hosted Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany and French President Émile Loubet here during state visits to her son. On October 5, 1910, with revolution underway in Lisbon, the royal family fled Portugal and the monarchy collapsed. Officials declared it a national monument that same year, on June 16, 1910, locking in its protection for good.

Architect Raul Lino restored the palace in the 1940s, bringing in old furniture from other royal properties and repairing the tile panels room by room. The work aimed to return the building to something close to its medieval and Renaissance appearance. In 1995, UNESCO named the wider Cultural Landscape of Sintra a World Heritage Site, and the palace sits inside that listed landscape today.

The Sintra National Palace now operates as a historic house museum, one of the most visited in Portugal. Its twin conical chimneys still mark the skyline over the old town. Inside, the Swan Room, the Magpie Room and the Coat of Arms Room keep their painted ceilings from the 15th and 16th centuries. The Arab Room's fountain still runs at its center, much as it did under Manuel I. A Moorish geographer named Al-Bakrî wrote of a fortress on this spot as far back as the 10th century, making this one of the oldest continuously named sites in Sintra's long record. Quinta da Regaleira stands a short drive away, with its famous initiation well cut deep into the hillside.