National Palace of Sintra

• Guide to the sumptuous interiors and fascinating history of this medieval Palace located in the Sintra Cultural Landscape, a UNESCO World Heritage Site

Founded under Arab rule and the sole survivor of Portugal’s medieval palaces, the Palace of Sintra has been an iconic feature of the Sintra landscape for many centuries, with its two gigantic conical chimneys. The Palace was a favourite of Portuguese monarchs, the court, the aristocratic and bourgeois elites and innumerable foreign visitors who have flocked here for more than eight centuries. Today, the Palace receives around 400,000 visitors a year.

The Palace boasts a remarkable collection of furniture and artworks representative of Portuguese taste from the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries, including Chinese porcelain, Indo-Portuguese furniture and Hispano-Moresque tiling.