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Pena Palace Sintra · Portugal
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From monastery to palace · 1511 – 1910

The history of Pena Palace and Ferdinand II

Pena was not built by a Portuguese king. It was built by a German prince married to a Portuguese queen, on the ruins of a monastery, twenty-five years before Bavaria’s Neuschwanstein.

  • Monastery 1511
  • Earthquake 1755
  • Palace from 1838
  • UNESCO 1995
See guided and theatrical visits See visits What you see inside
The yellow façade of Pena Palace, with battlements and tilework, seen from the courtyard

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The history of Pena Palace comes in two very different halves, and the building tells both at once. The first is religious and runs three centuries. The second is Romantic, political and runs seventy years. What you visit today is one folded into the other.

Timeline

  1. 15th c.

    The hilltop chapel

    A chapel dedicated to Our Lady of Pena stands on the site, a place of pilgrimage at the top of the Sintra hills.

  2. 1511

    The Hieronymite monastery

    King Manuel I orders a monastery of the Order of St Jerome built here, housing around eighteen monks. The Manueline cloister you can still walk dates from this phase.

  3. c. 1529

    The Chanterene altarpiece

    Nicolau Chanterene carves the chapel altarpiece in alabaster and marble, commissioned by Manuel I. It is the oldest and most valuable work of art on the site.

  4. 1755

    The earthquake

    The tremor of 1 November flattens the monastery. Chapel and cloister survive, partly damaged; the rest is left in ruins and stays that way for decades.

  5. 1834

    Dissolution of the religious orders

    With the dissolution of religious orders in Portugal, the property passes to the state and is put up for sale.

  6. 1838

    Ferdinand II buys the ruins

    Ferdinand of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, king consort to Maria II and cousin to Albert of England, acquires the ruined monastery and the surrounding hills. Rebuilding starts immediately.

  7. 1840–1854

    Building the palace

    Baron Wilhelm Ludwig von Eschwege directs the work. The programme mixes neo-Gothic, neo-Manueline, neo-Moorish and neo-Renaissance references — the language of European Romanticism applied to a Portuguese site.

  8. 1840s

    Planting the park

    In parallel, Ferdinand II plants 85 hectares of garden over bare rock, with species brought from across the world. It is one of Europe’s first acclimatisation parks.

  9. 1869

    The Countess of Edla

    Widowed, Ferdinand II marries Elise Hensler, a Swiss-American opera singer given the title Countess of Edla. The couple build the Chalet at the western edge of the park.

  10. 1885

    Ferdinand II dies

    The palace passes by inheritance to the Countess of Edla and is later acquired by the Portuguese state, remaining in use by the royal family.

  11. 1910

    The end of the monarchy

    With the Republic declared, Queen Amélia leaves for exile. The palace is listed as a national monument and turned into a museum. Many rooms stay exactly as they were left.

  12. 1995

    World Heritage

    The Cultural Landscape of Sintra is inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage list, with Pena Palace as its symbolic centre.

Who Ferdinand II was

Ferdinand Augustus of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha was born in Vienna in 1816 and arrived in Portugal at twenty, to marry Queen Maria II. He never reigned in his own right — he was king consort, and regent for a short period — but his cultural influence exceeded that of any Portuguese monarch of the 19th century.

He was a draughtsman, watercolourist, engraver and ceramicist. He took a serious interest in botany, in monument conservation and in opera. He became known as "the artist king", and Pena is his manifesto: not a residence for display, but a total composition in which architecture, garden and landscape were conceived as a single work.

The comparison with Ludwig II of Bavaria is unavoidable, but the chronology runs the opposite way to what most people assume: Pena began in 1838; Neuschwanstein only in 1869.

Why the palace is those colours

The yellow, the red and the grey-lilac are neither a contemporary choice nor a tourism invention. They correspond to the original 19th-century polychromy, documented in period sources.

For much of the 20th century the palace was painted a uniform grey, the result of paint degradation and of later restoration decisions. The colours were reinstated from the 1990s onwards, based on stratigraphic analysis of the paint layers. Anyone who visited Pena before that saw a very different building — and one far less like what Ferdinand II built.

Guided and theatrical visits

Formats that go deeper into the history of the palace and the royal family.

Frequently asked questions

Who built Pena Palace?

Ferdinand II of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, king consort to Maria II, who bought the ruined monastery in 1838 and began rebuilding it as the royal family’s summer palace.

When was Pena Palace built?

Construction began in 1838, after the ruins were purchased, with the main phase running from 1840 to 1854 under Baron von Eschwege. A Hieronymite monastery had stood on the site since 1511.

What was there before the palace?

A monastery of the Order of St Jerome, ordered by King Manuel I in 1511 and destroyed by the 1755 earthquake. The Manueline cloister and the chapel survived and were absorbed into the palace.

Did Pena Palace inspire Neuschwanstein?

Pena came first: it began in 1838, against 1869 for the Bavarian castle. Both share the same European Romantic matrix, but there is no documented direct link between the two projects.

Who lived at Pena Palace?

Ferdinand II, the Countess of Edla and, later, the Portuguese royal family including King Carlos and Queen Amélia. Amélia left for exile in 1910 when the Republic was declared.

Why is Pena Palace yellow and red?

That is the original 19th-century polychromy, reinstated from the 1990s based on analysis of the paint layers. For much of the 20th century the building was painted grey.

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