Since antiquity it has been a place full of myths and legends about supernatural activities; the great Portuguese Renaissance poet, Luis de Camoes, referred to the mountains of Sintra as a land ruled by water nymphs. During the 17c Union of the Crowns of Spain and Portugal, Sintra became a summer retreat for the Portuguese nobility, from the heats, both social and thermal, of the Castilian court in Lisbon. 18c Portuguese royals outdid one another in building their country palaces there.

William Beckford, writer of ‘Vathek’ came to the palace of Seteais in the 1780s, and later rented the romantic palace of Montserrate where Francis Cook constructed an exotic Orientalist pavilion high up on a slope. Lord Byron waxed lyrical about Sintra’s charms: ‘Lo! Cintra’s glorious Eden intervenes, in variegated maze of mount and glen’, in his epic poem Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage. WH Auden, Christopher Isherwood and Stephen Spender sought solace here and wrote of their experiences, and the composer Richard Strauss saw in Sintra a garden “comparable to Italy, Sicily, Greece or Egypt, a true garden of Klingsor, and there in the heights, a castle of the Holy Grail”.