Castle of the Moors

The granite ridge above Sintra was fortified by the Moors between the eighth and ninth centuries, when the settlement below carried the name as-Shantara. It was the central place of a territory that was primarily agricultural, raised to protect that population and to hold the land routes linking Sintra to Mafra, Cascais and Lisbon. Its double circuit of walls follows the outcrop for some 450 metres, with a cistern cut beneath the enclosure and the alcáçova in the tower on the highest ground, later called the Torre Real. With Santarém it counted among the principal points in the military plan of Belata, the Muslim province answering to the later Ribatejo and Estremadura.

Sintra belonged to the taifa of Badajoz. Facing the Almoravid forces of Ali ibn Yusuf crossing from North Africa, the ruler of Badajoz, al-Mutawakkil, handed Sintra over with Santarém and Lisbon to Alfonso VI of León and Castile, buying a defensive alliance with territory. It bought nothing: occupied with his own lands, the Christian king could not come to his aid, and in 1094 the towns fell to the Almoravids.

Sintra's fate followed Lisbon's. When Lisbon fell in 1147 to the forces of Afonso Henriques, the castle surrendered voluntarily and for good. The king put its security in the hands of thirty inhabitants and granted them privileges in the foral he signed in 1154, a charter inviting settlers to occupy and inhabit the castle as the means of securing the region. In the second half of the twelfth century the chapel inside the walls became the parish seat, and his son Sancho I remodelled and strengthened the defences in turn.

Local legend tells it differently. Fearing a surprise attack during his siege of Lisbon, Afonso Henriques is said to have sent the Templar knight Dom Gil with twenty trusted men to watch the Moors of Sintra; between Colares and Penedo an apparition of Our Lady told them not to fear, for they went as twenty but went as a thousand. In the legend they stormed the castle, and the chapel of Nossa Senhora de Melides — mil ides, a thousand go — was raised for it.

Castilian troops besieged the castle during the Fernandine Wars, and in 1375 Ferdinand I ordered it rebuilt on the counsel of João Annes de Almada, his vedor da fazenda. The work held: the structure was well fortified by 1383. Its military importance was draining away all the same, as the inhabitants left the hilltop for the old village of Sintra.

In the succession crisis that followed, the castle's alcaide-mor, Henrique Manuel de Vilhena, declared for Beatriz. Fernão Lopes, chronicling the reign of João I, records that the place entrusted to him was strong and very high and rugged; Vilhena gave it up only after João I's victory at Aljubarrota.

The kings came to prefer the Paço Régio in the village below, and the town grew around it while the castle slipped into second place. Its chapel was still in religious use at the beginning of the fifteenth century; by 1493 it stood abandoned, and it was afterwards used by the small Jewish community of the parish, by then the castle's only inhabitants. In the sixteenth century the parish of São Pedro moved down to the new church in the village, the Jewish families were expelled by Manuel I, and the castle was left empty.

Lightning damaged the keep in 1636, and the Lisbon earthquake of 1755 carried the harm much further, damaging the chapel and unsettling the stability of the castle. By 1838 the towers were already in ruins.

In 1839 Ferdinand II, consort of Maria II, took the ruined castle on lease from the municipal council of Sintra, moved by the Romantic rediscovery of the Middle Ages. He consolidated the walls, reforested the ground, cut paths and viewpoints through it and conserved the chapel, raising a monument along its southern flank to hold the bones turned up by the works. Wilhelm Ludwig von Eschwege oversaw a campaign amateur in character but enough to arrest an advanced decay.

What it produced was a ruin in the Romantic taste rather than a restored fortress. The towers, which had originally carried two floors, lost their internal divisions and roofing, and the works added damage of their own and probably made later archaeology harder. The castle and its cistern were classified a National Monument in 1910, stretches of wall were rebuilt from 1939, and excavation in the Chapel of São Pedro in 1979 uncovered medieval tombs from the turn of the thirteenth century.