Castle of the Moors

Interesting facts

Excavations on the hilltop have uncovered traces of Neolithic settlement, showing people lived here thousands of years before the Moorish walls were raised.

Archaeologists have found the remains of an Islamic quarter between the walls, with house foundations, storage silos, a communal oven and pottery from the 10th to 12th centuries.

Digs around the ruined chapel have revealed more than thirty medieval Christian tombs, part of a cemetery from around the turn of the 13th century.

The chapel, São Pedro de Canaferrim, was Sintra's first parish church, and its carved capitals feature griffins, basilisks and plant motifs.

Local tradition long held that the chapel had been a mosque before the Christian conquest, but there is no evidence linking this building to Islamic worship.

According to legend, the Virgin appeared to a Templar knight and twenty companions sent to spy on Sintra's Moors, promising that their twenty would count as a thousand.

While restoring the castle, Ferdinand II built a monument beside the chapel to hold the human bones uncovered during the works.

The positions of the surviving turrets appear to match the drawings of Duarte de Armas, whose early 16th-century Book of Fortresses recorded Portugal's castles.

A small door in the northern wall, usually hidden by undergrowth, is known as the Traitors' Gate.

The castle rises from an eruptive massif of granite, syenite, gabbro and diorite, which explains the huge rounded boulders its walls climb over.

Why it is worth it

The Castle of the Moors runs along the crest of the Sintra hills like a stone dragon, its double line of walls climbing over granite boulders among dense woods. Built in the 8th and 9th centuries, when this was part of Muslim Iberia, it protected a farming district and was one of the key strongpoints of the region between Lisbon and Santarém. After Afonso Henriques took Lisbon in 1147, the castle surrendered to him without a fight; his charter of 1154 entrusted it to thirty settlers with special privileges.

A chapel of São Pedro inside the walls became a parish church in the 12th century, and in 1375 King Ferdinand I ordered the castle rebuilt. But the inhabitants were drifting down to the town of Sintra, and by the end of the 15th century the chapel was abandoned. The small Jewish community that used the site was expelled under Manuel I, and the castle was left empty. The 1755 earthquake badly damaged it.

What visitors walk today owes a great deal to the 19th century. In 1840 King Ferdinand II, the builder of the nearby Pena Palace, began consolidating the walls, replanting the slopes and creating paths and viewpoints, turning the fortress into a Romantic ruin in a landscaped setting. The work, overseen by Wilhelm Ludwig von Eschwege, reshaped the towers and makes the site harder for archaeologists to read, but it created one of the most atmospheric walks in Portugal. The walls follow a 450-metre circuit; the highest point is the Royal Tower, at the southwest corner. Inside are the ruined chapel, silos from the Islamic period and a large vaulted cistern, 18 metres long. On a clear day the view reaches Mafra and the coast at Ericeira, and across to the Pena Palace on the neighbouring peak.

The castle is a National Monument and part of the Cultural Landscape of Sintra, a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Paths are steep and uneven, and the hills are often cooler and foggier than Lisbon.

Getting there

The castle is on the hills above Sintra, about 1.5 km from the historic centre and some 25 km northwest of Lisbon; it can be reached on foot from the village or from the road near the Pena Palace. Trains on the Sintra line run from Lisbon's Rossio station to Sintra. The nearest airfield, Cascais (CAT), has no regular airline service; the practical airport is Lisbon Humberto Delgado (LIS), about 22 km away.

Plan your visit

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From the encyclopaedia

The Castle of the Moors is a hilltop medieval castle located in the central Portuguese civil parish of Santa Maria e São Miguel, in the municipality of Sintra, about 25 km (16 mi) northwest of Lisbon. Built by the Moors in the 8th and 9th centuries, it was an important strategic point during the Reconquista, and was taken by Christian forces after the fall of Lisbon in 1147. It is classified as a National Monument, part of the Sintra Cultural Landscape, a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0

Interesting facts

Why it is worth it

Getting there

Plan your visit

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From the encyclopaedia