A king was shut in this palace until he died

Pedro III died inside the palace behind these chimneys

Pedro III of Portugal died inside the palace whose twin chimneys rise above the rooftops just ahead of you. He had been king only in name for most of his reign, ruling jointly with his wife and niece, Queen Maria I, after their marriage joined two branches of the same royal family. He was 69 when he died at Sintra in 1786, one more monarch whose life closed inside these walls rather than in Lisbon's grander palaces downhill.

The building itself, standing ninety meters from this spot, had been receiving Portuguese kings since the 1400s. It is the country's best-preserved medieval royal residence, lived in almost without a break from the early 15th century to the close of the 19th. Its huge conical chimneys, visible from most of the old town, belong to the palace kitchens João I built when he began reshaping the place around 1415. Pedro III's death there was not an isolated event. It was one entry in a long ledger of royal arrivals and departures that the palace had been keeping for three and a half centuries by the time he died in it.

A king was born and died in the same rooms

Decades before Pedro III, the same palace had already closed a life it opened. Afonso V of Portugal was born inside it in 1432 and died inside it in 1481, king of Portugal and the Algarves for most of the years between. He is remembered as "the African" for his campaigns across the Strait of Gibraltar, but his story at Sintra runs the other direction: cradle to deathbed, the crown's whole arc completed inside one building. Where he was born is, as near as the records allow, where he was carried out.

The chapel where royal births and deaths of this kind were marked still stands inside the palace, its ceiling patterned in Moorish latticework, its tiled floor laid to look like a carpet in the apse. It is the oldest surviving part of the building, possibly raised under King Dinis I in the early 1300s — older than Afonso V's birth by more than a century, and still standing when he died in the same rooms it once blessed him in.

A deposed king was confined here by his own brother

Not every king inside these walls left on his own terms. A century after João I's building campaign, the palace held a monarch who was not allowed to leave at all. Afonso VI, judged unfit to govern, was deposed by his own brother, Pedro, and confined here — the same rooms that had cradled Afonso V's birth now serving as a cell for a king his family had decided could no longer be trusted with the crown. He never regained it. He died still shut inside the palace, powerless in the same halls where centuries of his ancestors had once ruled freely.

Moorish rulers held this ground before the crown took it

Before any of that, the ground the palace sits on belonged to someone else entirely. The building started as the residence of the Moorish Taifa rulers of Lisbon, part of the Islamic al-Andalus that followed the Umayyad conquest of the peninsula in the 8th century. An Arab geographer, Al-Bakri, gave one of the earliest written mentions of the place. In the 12th century, King Afonso Henriques took it by force after his conquest of the region, folding the Moorish rulers' seat into the new Portuguese crown. The Gothic, Manueline and Mudéjar styles visible on the building today were layered on top of that older seizure, mostly during building campaigns in the 15th and early 16th centuries. The hilltop Castle of the Moors, a short climb above the town, was the other half of that Moorish defense — now a ruin, while the palace below it kept being lived in.