Pena Palace

Feel the air first. Up here, near the top of the Sintra hills, it is often cooler and damper than the town below. Mist can drift through the trees and across the walls in slow white bands. Then, through a gap in the green, the colours appear. There is warm yellow, deep red and pale grey stone, stacked on a rocky summit like something from a storybook. Take a breath. You are standing at Pena Palace.

This was not the first building on this hill. In the early sixteenth century, King Manuel the First of Portugal founded a small monastery here for monks of the Order of Saint Jerome. It was dedicated to Our Lady of Pena. For centuries it was a quiet place of prayer, high above the forests. Then, in 1755, the great Lisbon earthquake struck. The shock wave damaged much of the monastery. Yet some parts survived, and you can still walk through them today.

The ruins waited for decades. Then a young German prince saw them. Ferdinand of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha had married Queen Maria the Second of Portugal, and he became King Ferdinand the Second. He loved art, music and old buildings. In 1838 he acquired the abandoned monastery and the land around it. His plan was not simply to repair it. He wanted to turn this rocky summit into a summer palace, and into a dream.

To understand that dream, it helps to know about Romanticism. This was a nineteenth-century movement in art and architecture. Romantic builders loved the past, the exotic, and wild nature. They did not copy one style faithfully. They mixed many styles to create emotion. Ferdinand worked with Baron Wilhelm Ludwig von Eschwege, a German mining engineer and amateur architect. Together they built one of the earliest great Romantic palaces in Europe, finished around the middle of the century.

Look at the walls around you and try to name the styles. You will find pointed Gothic arches and onion-shaped domes. There are horseshoe arches inspired by Islamic architecture, and battlements like a medieval castle. You will also see twisted ropes and sea shapes carved in stone. These come from the Manueline style, a Portuguese late Gothic style full of maritime motifs from the Age of Discovery. Nothing here is accidental. Every mix was a choice.

Now for the first surprise. Many visitors assume the bright colours are a modern touch for tourists. In fact, the palace was painted in strong colours in Ferdinand's time. Over the years the paint faded, and for a long period the walls looked much greyer. Restoration work in the late twentieth century brought back the original red and ochre yellow. So the playful look you see today is close to what the king himself intended.

Find the archway with the fierce stone creature above it. This is the Triton Arch. A Triton is a sea figure from Greek myth, half man and half fish. Here he sits inside a shell, with coral and vines growing around him, and he looks as if he holds up the window above. The figure is often read as an allegory of the creation of the world, rising out of the sea. Stand beneath it and look up at the expression on his face.

Inside, the old and the new sit side by side. The original monastery cloister survives, small and quiet, with its walls covered in decorative tiles. Portuguese painted tiles are called azulejos, and they appear all through the palace. The chapel also survived the earthquake. Its altarpiece of alabaster and marble is attributed to the Renaissance sculptor Nicolau Chanterene. Look closely at its delicate carved scenes. It is far older than the colourful rooms around it.

Here is the second surprise. The royal rooms are arranged much as they were in the early twentieth century. In 1910, a revolution ended the Portuguese monarchy. Queen Amélie, the last queen of Portugal, had spent time at Pena, and the royal family left the country soon after. The furniture, the dishes and the personal objects stayed behind. Walking through these rooms, you see a royal summer home stopped at the moment its family went into exile.

Step onto the terraces if you can. On a clear day the view opens in every direction. You can see the green Sintra hills, the town far below, the old Moorish Castle on its nearby ridge, and the Atlantic Ocean shining to the west. On a misty day, the world may vanish completely. Both experiences are real Sintra. The hills create their own weather, and that weather is part of what drew the Romantic imagination here.

The palace was only half of Ferdinand's project. Around it he planted a vast park, with trees and plants brought from many parts of the world. There are ferns, lakes, winding paths, and hidden pavilions. On a rock facing the palace stands a large stone figure of a warrior. Locals often say it represents the architect Eschwege, watching over his work, though that is a popular story rather than settled fact. Look for it across the valley.

The park also holds a love story. Later in life, after Queen Maria died, Ferdinand married Elise Hensler, an opera singer, who became the Countess of Edla. Together they built a small chalet in the park, in a Swiss style. After Ferdinand's death, the Portuguese state acquired the palace. Today the palace and park form part of the Cultural Landscape of Sintra, listed by UNESCO as a World Heritage Site in 1995.

Before you move on, pause for a moment. Put a hand on a cool stone wall if you can. Listen for the wind in the trees and the voices echoing under the arches. Look once more at the yellow tower against the sky, or against the mist. As you walk down the hill, glance back at the summit. A German prince looked at a broken monastery here and imagined all of this. Now, for a few minutes, it is yours.