Europe's Most Fantastical Palace Landscape: Pena's Coloured Towers, Masonic Initiation Well & the Edge of the Continent
📍 Sintra, Portugal📅 3-day itinerary
The UNESCO hill town 25 km from Lisbon where 19th-century Romantic architects competed to build the most fantastical palace in the forested serra — the polychrome Pena Palace on the highest peak combining Manueline Gothic with Moorish and Baroque in a style invented for the occasion, the Quinta da Regaleira's 27-metre spiral underground well symbolising nine Masonic initiations, and the Moorish Castle's 8th-century ramparts still intact on the ridge where Alfonso Henriques founded the Portuguese kingdom in 1147.
The Yellow and Terracotta Palace Built by a German Prince Who Married Portugal's Queen on the Ruins of a Monastery Destroyed in the Earthquake That Killed 30,000 People & The Sintra National Palace Twin Chimneys That Rise 33 Metres Above the Kitchen and Define the Town Skyline from Every Approach
The 27-Metre Underground Spiral Tower with Nine Landings Representing Dante's Nine Circles of Hell Built by a Freemason Millionaire in 1904 & The Westernmost Point of Continental Europe Where Camões Wrote That the Land Ends and the Sea Begins
The Manueline Portal Where Every Centimetre of 32 Metres of Stone Is Carved with Maritime Flora and Navigational Instruments to Commemorate the Voyage That Opened the First Direct Sea Route from Europe to Asia & The Oldest Operating Bookshop in the World Open Since 1732 in a Neighbourhood Where Fado Has Been Sung Since the 19th Century