Places to Visit - Reviews

Sintra, Portugal, by Anthony Adolph

When we visited Sintra, some 10 miles west of Lisbon, Portugal, we found that Byron had been there too.  We flew from Gatwick to Lisbon on 12 June 2006: he sailed from Falmouth on the Princess Elizabeth on 2 July 1809, arriving at Lisbon on 7 July and riding up across the plain and up into the Sintra Mountains on 11 July and returning to Lisbon on 13th.  He stayed at Lawrence's Hotel, one of Europe's oldest hotels, where visitors can still stay now. 

When we visited Sintra, some 10 miles west of Lisbon, Portugal, we found that Byron had been there too.  We flew from Gatwick to Lisbon on 12 June 2006:

The former was a ruin in Byron's time, and the latter was a tiny convent, which Byron visited.  Sintra was 'discovered' by another English person, Philippa of Lancaster, a granddaughter of Byron's ancestor Edward III and wife of John I of Portugal, who chose its balmy heights as a royal retreat from sizzling Lisbon.  Byron clearly approved the choice, writing enthusiastically to Francis Hodgson on 16th,  '...we have seen all sorts of marvelous sights, palaces, convents, etc.  I must just observe that the village of Cintra in Estramadura is the most beautiful, perhaps in the world'.

After Byron had mounted his horse and ridden away to Spain en route for Greece, he wrote in Canto 18 of his epic Childe Harold's Pilgrimage:

Lo!  Cintra's glorious Eden intervenes
In variegated maze of mount and glen.
Ah me! What hand can pencil guide, or pen,
To follow half on which the eye dilates
Through views more dazzling unto mortal ken
Than those whereof such things the bard relates,
Who to the awe-struck world unlocked Elysium's gates?

I hadn't read those lines when I first saw the tree-clad slopes of Sintra: one of the special things about it is that the mountains' many spurs tend to turn in on themselves, so that views from one part of Sintra tend to be of other parts of it.  The eye is continually drawn to its beautiful Gothic buildings, its bright gardens and the 'variegated maze':  I gasped when I read that, as Byron had described exactly what we'd seen.

When Inspired in part by Byron, Ferdinand of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, cousin on Queen Victoria's husband Albert and consort of the Portuguese Queen maria II, 'restored' the Moorish Castle to what it is today and built the eccentric Palacio de Pena on the site of the former convent.  Byron's quotes are now the centre-piece of Sintra's tourist publicity.

There is even a cantinho do Lord Byron, full of Byronesque pictures and memorabilia, and a menu including two varieties of toasted sandwich - Tosta Byron, and Tosta Lord, indicating that the proprietors have not quite grasped the intricacies of the English peerage system, but an object of fascination for Japanese tourists.