Pena Palace

Pena Palace’s terraces, rooms and park

Your route through the palace keeps stepping outside, onto terraces and under carved arches, with the rooms in between. Then there’s the park, where paths run through the woods to lakes, a chalet and the highest point of the hills.

The Triton

Over the entrance to the New Palace wing is the Triton, a sea monster that’s half man and half fish. He sits on a shell above an arch covered in coral, and seems to hold up the window over his head.

Look higher and the sea turns into land: a tree grows out of his head, and vines spread over the window. Parques de Sintra, which runs the palace, says he recalls a character from Canto VI of The Lusiads, the epic by Camões, Portugal’s national poet.

He’s carved in limestone. Ferdinand is believed to have designed him, taking his supporting pose from the Manueline window of the Convent of Christ in Tomar. Sintra even has a legend of a triton who lived in the Fojo, a well in the rocks by Adraga beach.

The Queen’s Terrace and the view

On the terraces the view opens up. From the Queen’s Terrace you see the ocean and, to the east, Lisbon. To the south is the Cruz Alta, and across the park a statue of a medieval knight stands on a crag.

In summer an awning goes up over the terrace’s original iron frame. At the far end is the Arabic Cabinet, a small compartment where a telescope was kept, and the route also takes you along the wall walk.

The Stag Room, the Great Hall and the kitchen

Inside, a set route takes you through the New Palace, the wing Ferdinand added. In the Stag Room, where banquets were held, plaster stag heads carry real antlers, a touch borrowed from German Romantic castles.

Further on is the Great Hall, the biggest room in the palace. It was the billiard room until the table went in 1940, and its chandelier holds 72 candles, above Ferdinand’s Japanese and Chinese porcelain.

The rooms fill up, and visitors describe a slow shuffle from one to the next. Keep the camera in your pocket in the rooms, too: in the palace you can only take photos outside, on the terraces.

Near the end of the route, the kitchen still has its copper pans hanging in rows.

What’s left of the monastery: the chapel and the cloister

Ferdinand kept the heart of the old monastery. Its church is now the palace chapel, and its altarpiece was carved in alabaster and Sintra limestone between 1529 and 1532 by Nicolau Chanterene, a French sculptor, for King João III.

The stained glass is newer, from 1840, made by the Kellner workshop in Nuremberg.

The cloister is on the Complete visit, the ticket that adds the private apartments. They include the Queen’s office, the dressing room of Queen Amélia, Portugal’s last queen, and the chambers of King Carlos. Groups go round with a member of staff, 20 at most.

The park, the Cruz Alta and the Countess of Edla’s chalet

Below the palace the park spreads over the hill. On the way round are a temple of columns, the Monk’s Grotto, a valley of lakes and a garden of Asian camellias planted in the 1840s. Visitors find it quieter than the palace.

For the widest view, walk up to the Cruz Alta, at 528 metres the highest point of the Sintra hills. Lisbon and Cascais lie to the south, the Atlantic to the west. The cross is a 2008 copy in a single block of limestone, after lightning brought the old one down in 1997.

At the park’s western end stands the chalet Ferdinand built with Elise Hensler, an opera singer who became his second wife and the Countess of Edla. It closes earlier than the park, at 17:30, so don’t leave it until the end of the day.

Pena Palace tickets, time slots and the Lisboa Card

No part of Pena is free. The Essential ticket covers the palace rooms, the terraces, the park and the chalet. A park ticket, €12, leaves out the rooms, and the Complete visit, €45, adds the private apartments. A 90-minute guided tour of the palace is €75.

The Lisboa Card, €31, covers your train from Rossio and takes 10% off Pena. The discount only comes off at the palace’s own ticket desk, on the day.

At the desk you’re buying whatever palace times are left that day. Book the Essential ticket ahead for €22.40 and your time is fixed before you travel, with the card still paying for the train.

The time on the ticket is for the palace door, not the park gate, and the climb between them takes about 30 minutes. Arrive late and you won’t get in, with no refund. Arrive early and you can’t go in yet either, so use the spare minutes in the park.

The shuttle saves the climb. It leaves the park entrance every 15 minutes and isn’t part of the Essential ticket, but you can add it when you buy the ticket with the transfer option.

Even with a time, there can be a line at the palace entrance: one visitor in September waited over half an hour on a Sunday.

Parques de Sintra says the afternoon currently brings fewer people to the palace, though visitors find the mid-afternoon times among the first to sell out. One who came for the 9:30 opening found the terraces empty.

Bags can go in the lockers at the main entrance. Dogs aren’t allowed in Pena Park, though the Moorish Castle next door takes them.

Pena Palace history, from monastery to royal palace

A chapel stood on this hilltop from the 12th century. In 1503 King Manuel I built a monastery here, Our Lady of Pena, and it went to the monks of the Order of Saint Jerome, the same order as Lisbon’s Jerónimos Monastery.

The 1755 earthquake damaged the building without bringing it down. It was emptied in 1834, when Portugal closed its monasteries, and four years later Ferdinand bought it.

He was a prince of the German house of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, and Portugal remembers him as the King-Artist. Baron von Eschwege, a mineralogist and mining engineer, ran the works for him, and the new palace went up in the middle of the 19th century.

The last royal summers were spent here too. Ferdinand’s grandson King Carlos and Queen Amélia stayed for part of each summer from the 1890s, and Amélia was in the palace on 5 October 1910, the day Portugal became a republic. She left for Mafra, then sailed from Ericeira to Gibraltar and exile.

Pena Palace from Lisbon: the train, the 434 and the trails

Trains from Rossio reach Sintra in 40 minutes, and the Lisboa Card covers them. Private cars aren’t allowed up to the palace, so from the station you take the 434 bus, a separate fare, or walk one of the marked trails.

The quickest of the three trails is Villa Sassetti, 1.85 km and about 45 minutes uphill. Santa Maria, 1.77 km, takes about an hour, and Seteais, 2.41 km, about an hour and a half.

The 434 also stops at the Moorish Castle on the way up and comes back down through the old town. One 24-hour ticket covers it and the 435: