Sintra Audio Tours

Sintra is a town in the Serra de Sintra mountains about 30 kilometers west of Lisbon, and the combination of misty peaks, Atlantic moisture, and cool microclimates has made it a refuge from summer heat for as long as people have lived on the Iberian Peninsula. The Moors built a hilltop castle here in the 8th century and the Portuguese kings used it as a summer residence from the medieval period onward, which is why a town of 380,000 has an extraordinary density of palaces. Lord Byron visited in 1809 and called it a 'glorious Eden' in a letter to his mother, and the description has stuck because it is essentially accurate. The UNESCO World Heritage designation of 1995 covers the entire cultural landscape, not just individual monuments.

The Pena Palace, painted in vivid mustard yellow and crimson and perched on the highest peak, was built in the 1840s by King Ferdinand II as a Romantic fantasy combining Moorish, Gothic, Manueline, and Renaissance elements into something that looks like a fever dream of European architecture.

Below it, the ruined walls of the Moorish Castle from the 9th century offer panoramic views on clear days. In the town itself, the Quinta da Regaleira is a private estate built around 1900 by an eccentric millionaire and Freemason, its garden featuring an inverted tower that descends nine levels into the earth, connected by a network of tunnels. The only practical complaint about Sintra is its popularity: in summer the queues for Pena Palace are long and the main streets are very crowded, so arriving early or visiting in spring and autumn makes an enormous difference.