Capital of Romanticism
Sintra is a city and municipality in the Greater Lisbon region of Portugal, located on the Portuguese Riviera. The population of the municipality is around 380,000 in an area of almost 320 square kilometres. Sintra is at the current moment a major tourist destination in Portugal, famed for its picturesqueness and for its numerous historic palaces and castles. Sintra is also one of the wealthiest municipalities in the all country.
The historic center of the Village is famous for its 19th-century Romanticist architecture, historic estates & villas, gardens, and numerous royal palaces & castles, which resulted in the classification of the town and its historic passage as a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1995. Sintra is similarly known for its numerous gardens and nature parks, including the Sintra-Cascais Nature Park and the Sintra Mountains. Sintra's most iconic landmarks include the mediaeval Moorish Castle, the romanticist Pena National Palace and the Portuguese Renaissance Sintra National Palace.
From literature to music, Sintra has inspired and fascinated many with its mystical and involving atmosphere and various romantic figures have passed through Sintra. Famous Portuguese personalities as Almeida Garret, who, together with Alexandre Herculano, introduced Romanticism to Portugal, Bulhão Pato, Camilo Castelo Branco, Aquilino Ribeiro, the great Eça de Queirós, Fernando Pessoa, Vergilio Ferreira and so many others, as well as international personalities, as Lord Byron, Robert Southey, Hans Christian Anderson and Richard Strauss, for instance, all of them followers of the Romantic culture and have not just left their mark in Sintra but, above all, have left the mark of Sintra in their cultural legacies.
It was in the third quarter of the 18th century that the Romantic spirit of the foreign travellers and the Portuguese aristocracy exulted in the magic of Sintra and its environs, as well as the exoticism of its landscape and climate. William Beckford came to Sintra in the summer of 1787, as the guest of the fifth Marquis of Marialva, Chief Equerry of the Kingdom, and resided in his Seteais property. At the beginning of the 19th century, the Princess D. Carlota Joaquina, wife of the Regent D. João, bought the Ramalhão Estate and Palace. Between 1791 and 1793, Gerard Devisme built the neo-Gothic mansion on his extensive Montserrate estate. It was also the exoticism of this landscape, wrapped in mist for a large part of the year, which attracted another Englishman, Francis Cook, the second tenant of Montserrate after Beckford, who paid for the construction of the oriental-style pavilion that we know today. He was one of a series of foreign grandees who took up residence here in palaces, mansions and chalets, which they built or rebuilt in keeping with the possibilities offered by the unusual natural surroundings.
This extraordinary development of the Sintra landscape reached its peak in the reign of D. Fernando II of the dynasty of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha (1836-1885). Very much associated with Sintra and its landscape, which he held in great affection, this artist-king established Romanticism here with a splendour that is unique in the Mediterranean regions. The king acquired the Pena Convent, situated on a steep mountain, and transformed it into a fabulous magic palace, giving it the enormous size that only a romantic with great artistic vision and aesthetic sensitivity could dream of. It anticipates, so to speak, the famous castle of Neuchwanstein, built by Ludwig II of Bavaria. D. Ferdinand II also surrounded the palace with a vast romantic park planted with rare exotic trees, decorated with fountains, watercourses and chains of ponds, chalets, chapels and false ruins, and traversed by magic paths unrivalled anywhere else. The king also took care to restore the forests: thousands of trees were planted, mainly indigenous oaks and stone pines, Mexican cypresses, acacias from Australia and countless other species that made an outstanding contribution to the romantic character of the moutain "Serra de Sintra".
Historical and architectural circumstances dictated for Sintra and its mountains a unique individuality that was not confined to the Royal Palace of Pena. Quite the contrary, it oscillated between theory and the promotion of the "construction" of a romantic landscape in the form of archetypes that poured out into the vast array of revivalist architecture, continuing well into the 20th century.
Sintra is a parallel universe that we only know from dreams but which exists very near us. Sintra is the true and unique capital of Romanticism.
