Visite Sintra Sites - Portugal4You

The Portuguese navigations to the “New World” transformed Lisbon into the world commercial metropolis. Its location contributed to the success of the port that in its space held the people, wandering at an amazing pace: mainly soldiers, merchants, missionaries, adventurers and curious who were arriving or leaving to enter new voyages in a discovery of the world until then unknown.

At Sintra, the architecture and human occupation, the Serra, show a unique “cultural landscape” in the panorama of history in Portugal with a characteristic Micro-climate provided by the Serra. Classified by UNESCO as Cultural Landscape and Patrimony of Humanity 1995, at the end of the 18th century. From the nineteenth century the implantation of Romanticism by the King D. Fernando II attracts a large number of visitors. Becoming a unique cultural center with its palaces and manor houses.

There is still a whole literary heritage that has made this Sintra an almost legendary reference. Sintra, whose oldest known medieval form “Suntria” will point to the Indo-European “bright star” or “sun”, will have been designated by Boar and Columella as Sacred Mount. Ptolemy recorded it as the “Serra da Lua” and the Arab geographer Al-Bacr, in the tenth century, characterized Sintra as “permanently immersed in an undisguised mist“.

We can find in the village of Sintra testimonies of practically all eras of Portuguese history and, often, with a dimension that exceeded, by its importance, the limits of this territory.

In Sintra’s candidacy for World Heritage / Cultural Landscape with UNESCO. It was a matter of classifying an entire area assumed as a cultural and environmental context of specific characteristics. A cultural unit that has remained intact in a plethora of palaces and parks; of manor houses and their gardens and woods; of palaces and chalets set amidst lush vegetation; of extensive walled sections that crown the highest summits of the Sierra. Also a plethora of meditation convents among cliffs, woods and fountains: of churches, chapels and hermitages, secular poles of faith and art; finally, an intact cultural unit in a plethora of archaeological remains that point to several millennial occupations.

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