The king locked in his own family's house

A brother locked him away and took his throne

Afonso VI of Portugal came to the throne as a child, half paralyzed since a childhood illness and prone to violent rages. His younger brother Pedro ran the government in his name, then decided the arrangement should be permanent. In 1667, courtiers declared Afonso mentally unfit to rule and had him locked away. Pedro took the regency, married Afonso's own wife after her marriage was annulled, and later took the crown itself.

Afonso spent the rest of his life a prisoner inside the Sintra National Palace, the same building where kings before him had held court. He died there in 1683, still confined, at fifty years old.

The brother who jailed him died in the same rooms

A little over half a mile from where you stand, Pedro III of Portugal died at the Sintra National Palace in 1786. He was the same man who had confined his brother Afonso more than a century earlier and later ruled as king in his own right, jointly with his niece and wife, Maria I. By the time he died at Sintra, the palace had already stood for royal births, royal imprisonments and now a royal death, all inside the same rooms.

Much of that palace was not medieval at all but the work of João I of Portugal, who began rebuilding it around 1415. His campaign raised the courtyard wing known as the Ala Joanina, with its arched entrance and Moorish-style paired windows. The building that swallowed Afonso and later held Pedro's last days was largely João's creation, three and a half centuries old by the time either king lay inside it.

Thirty died in Sintra for believing a king lived

Confinement was not the only price this ground exacted for the wrong king. A century before Afonso VI was locked in the palace, thirty people in Sintra were hanged for believing a different king would come back. They followed Sebastianism, a movement that held King Sebastian, killed in battle in 1578, had not really died. Believers waited for his return to save Portugal from Spanish rule. Sintra's own gallows answered that hope with thirty deaths.

An earthquake spared the palace and ruined the hill above

On All Saints' Day in 1755, an earthquake struck Lisbon and the shock reached Sintra within minutes. The center of the town was destroyed. Many residents died in the quake and the tsunami that followed. Up on the hill above the palace, the old monastery that would later become Pena Palace was reduced to ruins. Only its chapel stayed standing. The royal palace where Afonso VI had died seventy years earlier survived the same shaking ground that leveled the buildings around it.

A monk shut himself in a cave for thirty years

Half a mile into the hills, the Capuchin monks built the Convento dos Capuchos, a monastery of tiny cork-lined cells. One friar there, known as Honório, lived nearly a hundred years. He spent his last three decades alone in a small cave inside the convent grounds, doing penance by choice. Afonso VI was shut inside stone walls by his brother's order. Honório shut himself inside a cave by his own.