Castle of the Moors

Castle of the Moors

A wall that rides the mountains

High in the green, misty hills of Sintra, near Lisbon, an extraordinary line of stone walls climbs and dips along the rocky ridges like the back of a sleeping dragon. This is the Castle of the Moors, and it looks a little like a small version of the Great Wall of China, winding through a forest of pines and giant grey boulders. From its highest tower, on a clear day, you can see all the way to the Atlantic Ocean.

Built by Muslim rulers

The castle was built more than a thousand years ago, in the 8th or 9th century, by the Moors — the Muslim rulers who governed much of Portugal and Spain at that time. They chose this high, foggy ridge because it could not easily be attacked and because it guarded the lands and farms around Sintra.

Inside the walls the Moorish soldiers and their families had everything they needed to survive a siege: storehouses for grain, and great cisterns — underground tanks — to collect rainwater. One of these cisterns still holds water today, cool and dark beneath the stone.

Won by the first king

In 1147, the same year that he captured Lisbon, Portugal's first king Afonso Henriques took Sintra and its castle from the Moors. The fortress passed into Christian hands, and a small chapel dedicated to São Pedro (Saint Peter) was built within the walls.

For a while the castle was home to a community of people, but as the centuries passed and the danger of war faded, families moved down to the more comfortable town below. By the 1400s the great walls stood almost empty, slowly being reclaimed by moss, ferns and trees.

Saved by a king who loved ruins

The castle might have crumbled away entirely if not for a king with a romantic imagination. In the 1800s King Ferdinand II of Portugal fell in love with the wild beauty of Sintra. He was building a fantastical, brightly coloured palace called Pena on the next peak — and he decided that the old Moorish castle should be rescued too.

Rather than rebuilding it as a grand new fortress, Ferdinand repaired the walls just enough to keep them standing and let them remain a beautiful, mysterious ruin in the woods. He even had romantic touches added, like a stone marker over a spot where old graves had been found. Thanks to him, the Castle of the Moors became part of one of the most magical landscapes in Europe.

A landscape like no other

Today the hills of Sintra, with the Castle of the Moors, the Pena Palace, grand villas and lush gardens, are protected by UNESCO as a place of special beauty and history. Mist drifts through the trees, and the forest feels enchanted.

Visiting today

Visitors can walk almost the entire length of the ancient ramparts, climbing up and down stone staircases worn smooth by time, with the wind in the pines and the boulders rising all around. From the towers the views stretch over Sintra's palaces, the green hills and the distant blue sea. Few castles in the world sit in so dreamlike a setting — a thousand-year-old wall riding the mountaintops above the clouds.