A Romantic palace on a mountaintop ruin

A monastery rises, falls, and waits in ruin

Palácio Nacional da Pena, known locally as Pena Palace, is a mountaintop palace near Sintra, now run as a museum. Its older core began as a monastery. In 1503, King Manuel I of Portugal ordered a convent built on this hilltop, where a chapel to Our Lady of Pena already stood. Manuel I gave it to the Hieronymite monks. A wooden structure went up first, replaced by 1511 with stone. For over three centuries the monastery held no more than eighteen monks at a time. In 1532, King João III and Queen Catarina added a jasper and alabaster altarpiece, fulfilling a vow made at the birth of their son. The monastery took a direct hit from lightning in the 18th century, but the worse blow came in 1755. The Lisbon earthquake collapsed the main church and left the rest in ruins. Portugal dissolved its religious orders in 1834, and the broken monastery sat empty for years after that.

In 1838, King consort Ferdinand II of Portugal bought the ruins along with the surrounding land, using his own fortune. Ferdinand kept the monastery's surviving chapel and cloister and built an entirely new palace around and above them. The German engineer Wilhelm Ludwig von Eschwege led the design, mixing Gothic, Moorish, and Manueline styles into one eccentric building. Ferdinand had the old monastery section painted red and the new wing painted yellow, so the two halves of its history stayed visible on the outside. Construction ran through the 1840s and into the 1850s, though Ferdinand kept adding towers and rooms for years afterward. His wife, Queen Maria II of Portugal, died in 1853 at age 34. Ferdinand later lived there with his second wife, the former opera singer Elise Hensler, who became Countess of Edla.

The royal family's last summers ended in exile

By the 1890s, King Carlos I of Portugal and Queen Amélia of Orléans were using Pena Palace as their summer home. In 1908, assassins shot and killed Carlos in Lisbon. His son became King Manuel II of Portugal and kept rooms in the palace's Turret Tower. Amélia often came to see him there. When revolt broke out in October 1910, Amélia stayed at Pena Palace and watched the fighting in Lisbon from its terraces. She spent her last night in Portugal under this roof before leaving for exile. Within days, the monarchy fell and the royal family never returned.

A museum keeps the royal rooms as they were left

The new republic made Pena Palace a national monument and opened it as a museum that same year. Decades passed, and the red and yellow paint on its towers faded to a uniform gray. In 1994, workers restored the original colors that Ferdinand had chosen, so the old monastery wing shows red again and the newer palace wing shows yellow. UNESCO named Pena Palace part of the Cultural Landscape of Sintra in 1995, protecting it alongside the nearby Castelo dos Mouros and other hilltop sites. In 2007, Portuguese voters chose it as one of the Seven Wonders of Portugal.

Inside, the rooms still hold furniture and decoration from the day the royal family left in 1910, including stuccoed ceilings and walls painted to look like marble. The Manueline chapel and cloister that survived the 1755 earthquake remain inside the palace, built into the same stone as the monks' old chapter house and refectory. Ferdinand's 200-hectare park surrounds the building, laid out with winding paths, a High Cross, a Temple of Columns, and a grotto built for a monk's solitary retreat. The palace draws around 1.5 million visitors a year, making it the most visited monument in Portugal.