"Sintra" a Sintra Travel Page by haiamisa

We visited Sintra on the 26th of September from Colares where we stayed for two nights. We visited the Palacio de Pena and the Pena park. After that we went to the country market that is held at Sao Pedro's main square on the second and last Sunday of every month. (It was the last Sunday of September) That was enough to see for one day, also because we were tired by then - tired of seeing so many things during our trip around Portugal, and also seeing one palace was enough for us. There are other palaces and much more to see in Sintra. You should stay there couple of days to see it all. You can also make a day trip from Lisbon by train.

Some history:
Sintra used to be the summer residence of the kings of Portugal and the Moorish lords of Lisbon before them. British travellers of the 18th and 19the century found a new Arcadia in its cool wooded heights. There is an old Spanish saying: "To see the world and not see Sintra is to go blind about."
Byron stayed here in 1809 and began "Childe Harold", his great mock-epic travel poem, in which the "horrid crags" of Cintra's glorious Eden "form a first location. Writing home in a letter to his mother he wrote:
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"..perhaps in every aspect the most delightful in Europe; it contains beauties of every description natural and artificial. Palaces and gardens rising in the midst of rocks, cataracts and precipices, convents on stupendous heights, a distant view of the sea and the Tagus...it unites in itself all the wildness of the Western Highlands with the verdure of the South of France."
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His description of Sintra's romantic appeal is exact and still fits after two centuries.