Location: Estrada da Pena, 5 km (3 mi) South of Sintra Map
Constructed: 1842–1854
Tel. 219 105 340
Open: Jul- mid- Sep: 10am- 6pm Tue- Sun
mid- Sep- June: 10am- 4:30pm Tue- Sun
Closed: 1 Jan, Easter, 1 May, 29 Jun, 25 Dec
The Pena National Palace, popularly referred to as Pena Palace or
Pena Castle, is located in the village of Sintra, parish of Sintra
(Santa Maria and São Miguel, São Martinho and São Pedro de
Penaferrim), municipality of Sintra, in the Lisbon district in
Portugal.
It represents one of the main expressions of
architectural Romanticism of the 19th century in the world,
constituting the first palace in this style in Europe, built about
30 years before Neuschwanstein Castle, in Bavaria.
On July 7,
2007 it was elected as one of the Seven Wonders of Portugal.
The palace is open for tourist visits, in 2013 it had 755,735
visitors, making it the most visited monumental palace in the
country that year.
Pena Palace has been classified as a
National Monument since 1910 and was classified as a UNESCO World
Heritage Site in 1995.
History
background
The occupation of the
steep top of the Sintra mountain range, where the current palace is
located, took place with the construction of a small chapel under
the invocation of Nossa Senhora da Pena, during the reign of João II
of Portugal.
In the 16th century, Manuel I of Portugal, in
fulfillment of a promise, ordered its reconstruction from scratch.
He donated it to the Order of Saint Jerome, determining the
construction of a wooden convent, and replacing it, a little later,
with a stone building, with accommodation for 18 monks.
In
the 18th century, a lightning strike destroyed part of the tower,
chapel and sacristy, damage that was aggravated as a result of the
1755 earthquake, which left the convent in ruins. Only the area of
the high altar, in the chapel, with an altarpiece in marble and
alabaster attributed to Nicholas de Chanterenne, remained intact.
Ferdinand II's Reformation
In the 19th century, the landscape
of the Sintra mountains and the ruins of the old convent amazed
King-Consort Fernando II of Portugal. In 1838 he decided to acquire
the old convent, the surrounding fence, the Moorish Castle and
surrounding farms and woods.
Regarding the area of the
former convent, he promoted several restoration works, with the aim
of making the building his future summer residence. The new project
was commissioned to the German mineralogist Baron von Eschwege, an
amateur architect. A well-traveled man, Eschwege, who was born in
Hessen, should have known, at least in the form of a project, the
works that Frederick William IV of Prussia had undertaken with
Schinkel's competition in the Rhine Castles, having gone on a study
trip to Berlin, England and France, Algeria and Spain (Cordoba,
Seville and Granada).
In Sintra, the work proceeded quickly
and the work would be almost completed in 1847, according to the
German's project, but with decisive interventions in terms of the
decorative and symbolic details of the king-consort. Many of the
details, in the constructive and decorative plans, were due to the
romantic temperament of the monarch himself who, along with pointed
arches, medieval suggestion towers and elements of Arab inspiration,
designed and reproduced, on the north facade of the Palace, an
imitation of the Chapter of the Convent of Christ in Tomar.
After Fernando's death, the palace was left to his second wife,
Elisa Hendler, Countess of Edla, which at the time generated great
public controversy, as the historic building was already considered
a monument. D. Fernando's widow then sought to reach an agreement
with the Portuguese State and received a purchase proposal from Luís
I of Portugal, in 1889, on behalf of the State, which she accepted,
thus reserving for herself only the Chalé da Condessa. , where he
continued to reside.
With this acquisition, the Palace became
part of the Portuguese national heritage, becoming part of the
Crown's heritage.
During the reign of Carlos I of Portugal,
the Royal Family frequently occupied the palace, becoming the
favorite residence of Queen D. Amélia, who took care of the
decoration of the intimate apartments. Here, lunch was served to the
entourage of Edward VII of the United Kingdom, during his official
visit to the country, in 1903.
After the regicide, Queen
Amélia retreated further to the Pena Palace, surrounded by friends
and her pet dogs. Here she was often visited by her son, Manuel II
of Portugal, who had his rooms reserved there. When the revolt of
the 4th of October broke out in 1910, D. Amélia waited in Pena for
the situation to evolve, arriving with her entourage to go up to the
terraces to observe signs of the fighting in Lisbon. The next day,
she left to meet D. Manuel, in Mafra, returning that same afternoon
to the Pena Palace, where she spent the night from the 4th to the
5th of October, the last night she spent in Portugal before the fall
of the Monarchy. The following day, with the triumph of the Republic
known, she left again for Mafra, to meet her son and mother-in-law,
from where they would all go into exile.
With the
establishment of the Portuguese Republic, the palace was converted
into a museum, with the official designation of Palácio Nacional da
Pena. In 1945, Queen Amélia, visiting Portugal, returned to Pena
Palace, where she asked to be alone for a few minutes: it was her
favorite palace.
Almost the entire Palace is built on huge rocks, and the mix of
styles it displays (Neo-Gothic, Neo-Manueline, Neo-Islamic,
Neo-Renaissance, with other artistic suggestions such as the Indian)
is truly intentional, insofar as the romantic mentality of the 19th
century XIX devoted an unusual fascination to exoticism.
Structurally, the Pena Palace is divided into four main areas:
The cuirass and surrounding walls (which served to consolidate the
construction site), with two doors, one of which has a drawbridge;
The body, fully restored, of the old Convent, slightly angled, at
the top of the hill, completely crenellated and with the Clock
Tower;
The Pátio dos Arcos opposite the chapel, with its wall of
Moorish arches;
The palatial area itself with its large
cylindrical bastion, with an interior decorated in a cathedral
style, according to current precepts and motivating important
decorative interventions in terms of furniture and ornamentation in
general.
During construction, although the basic structure
was maintained, changes were made to almost all the spans, at the
same time that the small cylindrical tower that was next to the
larger one was moved to the rear of the building. The arch of the
body, flanked by two towers, received a profuse decoration in relief
to imitate corals.
Above it, a window, the "bow window",
received at its base, also in relief, a figure of a hybrid being,
half-fish, half-man, emerging from a shell with his head covered by
hair that becomes a vine trunk whose branches are supported by the
enigmatic character, purposely recalling the bearded man from the
window of the choir room of the Convent of Christ in Tomar,
transformed here into a monstrous being of an almost demonic
character. This set, known as the "Portico do Tritão", was designed
by D. Fernando himself, who designed it as an "Allegorical Portico
of the Creation of the World", and seems to condense, in symbolic
terms, the "theory of the four elements". Reinforcing this
relationship with Tomar, the window on the opposite side of this
body copies with some freedom the famous Manueline span by Diogo de
Arruda, "flattening it". Nicolau Pires went to Tomar to design it
for the prince, who reformulated the set.
The set of
different guardhouses, the unevenness of the successive terraces,
the wall covering with neo-Spanish-Arab tiles, from the 19th
century, are significant elements. The adaptation of the window of
the Convent of Christ, on the Pátio dos Arcos side and the
remarkable figure of the Triton, symbolizing, according to some
authors, the allegory of the Creation of the World, are fundamental
details in the interpretation of this Palace.
The building's
plan is quite irregular and is conditioned by a pre-existing
construction – the Chapel of Nossa Senhora da Pena – and also by the
topography. The result is a roughly quadrangular nucleus, organized
around a cloister and an elongated one.
The facades are
divided by openings or twisted and fenestrated, more or less
regularly, and by quadrangular, rectangular and full-arch spans. The
towers and bastions have upper rings on top of cachorrada or
arcatura, forming walkways, viewpoints or terraces. The square
towers have circular watchtowers with conical roofs at the corners.
The main façade is covered with polychrome patterned tiles and
has a balcony on the third floor. In the quadrangular core, there
are several interrupted arcades on a wall. A U-shaped staircase
leads to the cloister, with two floors, with an arcade of full
arches on the first and lowered on the second. Around these are some
of the main rooms.
In the north wing is the chapel, lined
with standard tiles, with the nave separated from the chancel by a
rosewood web. The park's design was influenced by Germany's Romantic
Gardens.
All the towers (except the one of the Clock)
received cupolas. The inspirational motifs were essentially drawn
from Moorish and Spanish Mudejar sources and from almost all
Manueline works in Greater Extremadura, among which are: the Belém
Tower (justifying the guardhouses with gabled domes and the rows of
battlements), the Jerónimos (the spans, the ornamentation of braided
ropes and friezes), the Convent of Christ (the "bow window", the
almost caricatured expression itself) and the Palácio da Vila (the
friezes of Gothic reliefs on the cornices, and the very organic
realization of the complex). The roses with inscribed crosses
demonstrate the secret genealogy of the prince, which must
mythically go back to the Rosicrucian Fraternity of the 17th
century, of which the prince was grand master and, even later, to
the Order of Christ, heir to the Templars in Portugal.
The
design of the interiors of this Palace to adapt to the royal
family's summer residence valued the stucco works, mural paintings
in "trompe-l'oeil" and various tile coverings from the 19th century,
integrating the numerous royal collections in environments where the
taste by bric-a-brac and collecting are quite evident.
Sala dos Veados, large and cylindrical, with a large column as an
axis, currently displays the exhibition "Stained Glass and Glass: a
taste of D. Fernando II";
Saxe Room, where Saxe porcelain
predominates;
Noble Hall, where stucco, chandeliers, furniture and
pieces of stained glass vary from the 14th to the 19th century, and
where Masonic and Rosicrucian elements are mixed;
Cabinet of King D.
Carlos, former Chapter Room of the Jerónimo Monastery and Tea Room in
the time of D. Fernando II, was adapted to an office by King D. Carlos.
At the end of the 1970s, canvases representing Nymphs and Satyrs were
placed in Parque da Pena, by King Carlos;
Terraço da Rainha, from
where you can better observe the architecture of the Palace, the Sundial
with a cannon that fired at noon
Manueline cloister, original part of
the former 16th century monastery covered with Spanish-Arabic tiles
(c.1520)
Chapel, original part of the former monastery of the
Jerónimos friars
Rooms of D. Manuel II, where the large 16th century
oak bas-relief can be identified, by an unknown author, illustrating the
Taking of Arzila, acquired by D. Fernando in Rome;
Sala de Fumo, also
known as Sala Indiana, features valuable works of art, such as the
neo-Rococo glass chandelier (19th century) and the low-relief "Cólera
Morbus", by Vítor Bastos. The name of Sala Indiana derives from its
decoration, composed of teak furniture, of Indian manufacture placed
here on the initiative of the Architect Raul Lino, in 1940;
The
Visitor's Room, formerly known as the Arab Room, features a decoration
dating from 1854 by Paulo Pizzi. The painting in this room represents an
Islamic architecture under a vegetal vault. The perspective creates the
illusion of a wider space beyond the confines of the room.
Passage
Rooms with Wenceslau Cifka porcelain, belonging to the collections of
King Fernando II.
The chalet was built between 1864 and 1869, by Fernando II and his
second wife, Elise Hensler, Countess of Edla, in an area of eight
hectares west of Parque da Pena.
Conceived as a leisure haven, it
was built following the model of the Alpine Chalets, then in vogue in
Europe, and taking into account the origins of the Countess herself. It
is part of a garden where an area with large granite stones stands out.
After the fall of the Portuguese monarchy (1910), the complex
experienced abandonment and lack of maintenance, a situation that
culminated, in 1999, with an arson attack that destroyed much of the
interior of the chalet. The recovery process began with the creation of
the company Parques de Sintra - Monte da Lua, with a project by the
architect José Maria Lobo de Carvalho, and cost 1.5 million Euros (of
which 840 thousand, in 2007, from a community fund European
"EEA-Grants").
In stone and lime, the exterior cladding simulates
wood, a "pretending" common in the late 19th century. Two tons of virgin
cork were used to rebuild the cork cladding that covers the exterior
(decorative eaves, corners, door and window frames).
For the
recovery of the garden, collections of camellias, rhododendrons and
azaleas were used. To enhance the set of granite blocks, paths were
opened and benches were installed.
Once the work of the first
stage of the restoration intervention was completed, which recovered the
entire facade and structure of the building, the complex was reopened to
the public in May 2011.