Monserrate Palace

Interesting facts

Francis Cook, who built the palace, was one of Victorian Britain's great art collectors, owning works such as Velázquez's Old Woman Cooking Eggs.

By 1876 Cook's collection numbered some 510 major works, enough that he later added a long gallery to his London house to hold them.

According to legend, the first chapel on the hill was founded by Portugal's first king, Afonso Henriques, after he took Sintra around 1093.

A chapel to Our Lady of Monserrate was built on the hilltop in 1540, giving the estate the name it still carries.

The great Lisbon earthquake of 1755 left the farmhouse that then stood on the estate uninhabitable, and it lay in ruins when Byron passed by.

Its Moorish motifs nod to the centuries when the Sintra region belonged to Muslim al-Andalus, until the 13th century.

The gardens are arranged by geography, with tree ferns from Australia and New Zealand, agaves and yuccas from Mexico, and camellias and bamboos for Japan.

In 2013 the park received the European Garden Award for the best development of a historic park or garden.

On the estate's farm stands a 7.5-metre totem chainsawed by Welsh artist Nansi Hemming from a dying eucalyptus, carved with Sintra wildlife from genets to eagle owls.

The estate farm runs entirely off-grid, producing its own electricity from wind, a water turbine and solar panels installed in 2012.

Why it is worth it

Monserrate Palace is the most exotic of the romantic houses in the hills of Sintra: a strictly symmetrical building crowned by a dome, its arches and stonework carved with dense ornament drawn from Indian, Mughal, Moorish and Gothic sources. Around it spreads a landscaped park planted with species collected from across the world, sloping down a valley on the edge of the Serra de Sintra.

The estate has a long history. A chapel dedicated to the Virgin stood here in the Middle Ages, and in about 1790 the English merchant Gerard de Visme built a neo-Gothic house over its ruins. The writer William Beckford rented the property in 1793–1794 and began to shape its grounds, and Lord Byron visited in 1809; his lines about it in Childe Harold's Pilgrimage drew foreign travellers to Monserrate. The palace seen today was created for Francis Cook, a wealthy English textile merchant and art collector who acquired the estate in the 1850s and was later made Viscount of Monserrate. His architect James Knowles designed the new house in 1858 on the remains of de Visme's building, and it was built in the 1860s. Inside, an octagonal atrium with a Carrara marble fountain and a music room under a richly decorated dome show the same mixture of styles as the exterior.

The gardens, about 33 hectares, were laid out from 1863 onwards with the landscape gardener William Stockdale and developed until 1929. They include a valley of tree ferns, a Mexican garden, a rose garden and a Japanese garden. The Portuguese state bought the estate in 1949, and since 2000 it has been managed and restored by Parques de Sintra. Monserrate forms part of the Cultural Landscape of Sintra, inscribed by UNESCO in 1995.

Getting there

The palace lies on the western side of the Serra de Sintra, about 4 km from the historic centre of Sintra, which is linked to Lisbon by suburban rail. The nearest airport is Cascais Airport (CAT), about 10 km away, used mainly by small aircraft; Lisbon Humberto Delgado Airport (LIS) is the main international airport for the area.

Plan your visit

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Monserrate Palace

Interesting facts

Why it is worth it

Getting there

Plan your visit

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