Pena Palace (Palácio da Pena)

The Pena Palace (Palácio da Pena) crowns a peak of the Serra de Sintra in the municipality of Sintra, Portugal, about 25 km west of Lisbon. Its site held a small chapel to Our Lady of Pena from the Middle Ages, which King Manuel I gave to the Hieronymite order; after the 1755 earthquake the building fell into ruin and the monks left in 1834 when the orders were dissolved. In 1838 Ferdinand II, the German-born consort of Queen Maria II, bought the ruins and commissioned the Baron von Eschwege to turn them into a summer residence. Work ran from roughly 1842 to 1854 and produced one of Europe's finest expressions of Romantic architecture. The palace combines Manueline, Moorish, Gothic, and Renaissance elements, in bright yellow and red walls, a clock tower, domes, and an archway decorated with a Triton figure. Rooms inside have been preserved much as the royal family left them when the monarchy fell in 1910: the former monastery cloister, the Arab Room with trompe-l'oeil painting, the great hall, the king's studio, and furnished bedrooms. The surrounding Pena Park, planted with exotic trees from around the world, was laid out by Ferdinand himself and contains lakes, a chalet, and the Queen's Garden. The palace became a state museum in 1912 and was classified as a UNESCO World Heritage cultural landscape with Sintra in 1995. Interior and exterior colours were restored in the 1990s and 2010s after the exterior had weathered to grey, and conservation work continues. The presentation is a furnished historic house rather than a themed exhibition, with visitors following a set route through the rooms.