Portugal Travel Guía

Sintra is located in the Saw of Portugal, at scarce distance of the Portuguese capital, spreads from the rock end up to the city of its name, in a ten kilometers length for seven wide one. It is a very ancient city and it is especially crowded at the summer station, for its tourist attractive indicutibles that are, finally, traces of an epoch in which Sintra was a real residence.

In addition to pastime for the kings of Portugal, a meeting point has been throughout the centuries between rich European merchants and a sample of it there are some of the mansions constructed in the skirts of its mountains, property of some of them or of its progeny.

Between its monuments they deserve special mention the Castelho two Mouros and the Park and Palace gives Penha.

The first one of them, Castle of the Moors in Spanish, is a military fortification of the IXth century, epoch of the Moslem occupation of the peninsular territory. Due to its position privileged to watch the coast line, its function would be that of lookout. In the enclosure of the castle we can find the Door of the Transition, a secret passage towards the exterior of the fortitude that would allow the escape or the entry of reinforcements, the Real Tower, to which he was named this way for being the favorite place of Don Fernando II to do, the Citadel, which was a residence of the Jailer in the Moslem epoch. The last one was the noble area of the castle, prepared to be the last stronghold that would resist to any attack come from the exterior as from the interior of the fortitude.

The House of the Cabelleros, which might have been the house of the guard with unja original structure of three apartments; The Church of Saint Peter de Canaferrim, the first parochial church of Sintra built in the XIIth century after the Reconquest of Don Alfonso Henriques in 1147; The Brief or Charnel house constructed in the XIXth century to get the exhumed bodies of the atrium of the ancient Church during the achievement of the campaign of restoration, or the Siloes, a few excavations in the rock used for the Moors to store cereals and that from the conquest cristian (in the XIIth century) were used like dumps of the people, are different of the stops that the visitor will have to realize along the trip of the big wall of the castle.

The Palace gives Penha and the park in which this one is nailed there are the maximum expression of the Romanticism of the XIXth century in Portugal. COntituyen the most important frame of the Cultural landscape of Sintra-Patrimonio Mundial. The Palace integrates the noble, biggest lounge of the building and that was usually used for receptions. Him conce like Lounge of the Ambassadors or of the Billiards. The chapel of the palace is an original part of the ancient monastery of the monks Jerónimos, which possess an enormous convent in Lisbon. The Merman, an allegorical porch of the creation of the world, lodges the figure of half a man and half a fish, in one of the most photographed areas of the palace.

Other elements of the enclosure are the cabins, of varied forms and workmanships, the cloister Manuelino, the Arab Lounge, the atelier of king Don Carlos or the patio of the Queen, of big dimensions and with spectacular conference towards the mount and the wall of the Castelho two Mouros that is to scarce meters opposite to the real residence.