Quinta das Murtas
For most day trippers, Sintra is a whirlwind couple of hours, running from one historic palace to the next. Like many of our favourite Portuguese towns, you can only get a true feel for Sintra when you stay there – it’s a busy tourist hotspot during the day, yet in the quiet evenings its elevated hilltop location and the surrounding cedar forests are a cool escape from the heat of the capital Lisbon.
Quinta das Murtas was built for this very purpose – a 19th century summer palace, commissioned by Eduardo Vanel on the occasion of his daughter Cecilia’s marriage to Manuel de Castro, the grandson of Dom Pedro I, the 1st emperor of Brazil. The palace remained in the family until 1998, when it was purchased by the current owners and sympathetically converted into today’s B&B.
Great care was taken to renovate and reinvigorate its original architectural features: the striking geometric mosaic floors, the ostentatious gothic stone archways, and the elaborately painted panelled reliefs. The design is typical of the tail-end of Romanticism, when Portuguese architects threw caution to the wind, combining medieval and Manueline features, with islamic and byzantine. With preservation at the heart of the conversion, each of the guest rooms are individual – different in their size and their décor. There are also two apartments, one two-bedroom and one four-bedroom, with kitchenettes if you’d prefer to semi-self-cater.
There are more modern, purpose-built hotels in Sintra, with standard rooms in matching sizes – only Quinta das Murtas gives you a glimpse of life for the upper classes in 19th century Portugal.
