Pena Palace

A chapel dedicated to Our Lady of Pena stood on the rocky summit above Sintra long before there was any palace, built by tradition after an apparition of the Virgin Mary; accounts place its building as early as the twelfth century and as late as the reign of John II. In 1493 John II came up to the site with his wife Leonor of Viseu on pilgrimage, to fulfil a vow. His successor Manuel I, who was attached to the sanctuary, ordered it rebuilt from the ground in fulfilment of a promise of his own and gave it in 1503 to the Order of Saint Jerome, first putting up a wooden convent and then replacing it with a stone building with room for eighteen monks.

For centuries that was all it was, a small and quiet place of meditation for no more than eighteen brothers. In the eighteenth century lightning brought down part of the tower, the chapel and the sacristy, and the earthquake of 1755, following shortly after, left the convent in ruins. The high altar came through it, with the marble and alabaster retable attributed to Nicolau de Chanterene, and the ruins were then left alone for decades.

The ruins and the mountain landscape struck the king consort Ferdinand II, and in 1838, four years after the religious orders in Portugal were dissolved, he bought the old convent, the enclosure around it, the neighbouring Castle of the Moors and farms and woods in the area. The plan was a summer residence for the royal family, and the commission went to Baron Wilhelm Ludwig von Eschwege, a German mineralogist and mining engineer, born in Hesse, who was an amateur architect rather than a professional one. He had travelled to Berlin, England and France, to Algeria and to Córdoba, Seville and Granada, and would have known, at least as designs, the work Frederick William IV of Prussia had undertaken with Schinkel on the castles of the Rhine.

Work ran between 1842 and 1854 and the building was all but finished by 1847, to Eschwege's design but with decisive intervention on decoration and symbolism from Ferdinand and from Queen Maria II. The king asked for pointed arches, towers of medieval suggestion and elements of Islamic inspiration, and he drew for one facade an imitation of the chapter house window of the Convent of Christ at Tomar. Ferdinand also designed the portico of the Triton, a hybrid half fish and half man rising from a shell with hair turning into a vine, which he called an allegorical portico of the creation of the world. As much of the Hieronymite convent as could be kept was kept, the cloister, the refectory, the sacristy and the Manueline-Renaissance chapel, embedded in a new range with a wide terrace and a clock tower finished in 1843. The Queen's Terrace carries a sundial cannon that once fired every day at noon.

Palace and park were conceived together. The Pena Park covers more than 200 hectares of broken ground, laid out by Ferdinand II with the help of Baron von Eschwege and Baron von Kessler and influenced by the romantic gardens of Germany. The king ordered trees brought from distant countries: North American sequoia, Lawson's cypress, magnolia and western red cedar, Chinese ginkgo, Japanese cryptomeria, and ferns and tree ferns from Australia and New Zealand gathered in the Queen's Fern Garden.

Between 1864 and 1869 Ferdinand and his second wife, Elise Hensler, Countess of Edla, had a chalet built on eight hectares west of the park, on the model of the Alpine chalets then in fashion and in keeping with the Countess's own origins. When Ferdinand died he left the palace to her, which caused considerable public controversy, since the building was by then regarded as a monument. The widow sought terms with the Portuguese State, and in 1889 accepted a purchase offer made by Luís I in the State's name, keeping only the Countess's Chalet, where she went on living.

Under Carlos I the royal family used the palace often, and it became the favourite residence of Queen Amélia, who took charge of decorating the private apartments. The king turned the old chapter house of the Hieronymite monastery, which had been Ferdinand II's tea room, into his own study. Edward VII's party was given lunch at the palace during his official visit to Portugal in 1903.

After the regicide Amélia withdrew further into Pena, where her son Manuel II kept apartments of his own and visited her often. When the revolt broke out on 4 October 1910 she waited at Pena for the situation to develop, and went up to the terraces with her companions to watch for signs of the fighting in Lisbon. She left the next morning for Mafra to join Manuel and came back the same afternoon, spending the night of 4 to 5 October at the palace, the last she spent in Portugal before the fall of the monarchy; once the Republic's victory was known she went again to Mafra, and from there the family left for exile. With the Republic the palace was turned into a museum under the official name of the Palácio Nacional da Pena.

Amélia came back in 1945, on a visit to Portugal, and asked to be left alone in it for a few minutes; it was the palace she had loved best. The red and yellow of the facades faded over the years until the building was generally taken to be grey, and it was repainted in its original colours by the end of the twentieth century. In 1995 the palace and the rest of the cultural landscape of Sintra were classified by UNESCO as World Heritage, and on 7 July 2007 the palace was voted one of the Seven Wonders of Portugal.

The Countess's chalet fared worse. Abandoned and unmaintained after the fall of the monarchy, it was gutted by an arson fire in 1999 that destroyed much of the interior. Restoration began with the setting up of the company Parques de Sintra - Monte da Lua, to a design by the architect José Maria Lobo de Carvalho, at a cost of 1.5 million euros, of which 840,000 came in 2007 from the European EEA Grants fund; two tonnes of virgin cork went into rebuilding the cork latticework on the outside, and the chalet reopened to visitors in May 2011.

The palace has been classified as a National Monument since 1910 and takes visitors in numbers: 755,735 came in 2013, making it the most visited monumental palace in the country that year. The President of the Portuguese Republic and other officials still use it for state occasions.