The Pena Palace (Portuguese: Palácio da Pena) is a Romanticist castle in São Pedro de Penaferrim, in the municipality of Sintra, on the Portuguese Riviera.
The castle stands on the top of a hill in the Sintra Mountains above the town of Sintra, and on a clear day, it can be easily seen from Lisbon and much of its metropolitan area.
It is a national monument and constitutes one of the major expressions of 19th-century Romanticism in the world. The palace is a UNESCO World Heritage Site and one of the Seven Wonders of Portugal.
It is also used for state occasions by the President of the Portuguese Republic and other government officials.
The construction of the castle occurred after an apparition of the Virgin Mary.
The eclectic, extravagant interior is equally unusual, brimming with precious Meissen porcelain, Portuguese-style furniture, trompe murals, and Dom Carlos’ unfinished nudes of buxom nymphs.
The Pena Palace has a profusion of styles much in accordance with the exotic taste of Romanticism. The intentional mixture of eclectic styles includes the Neo-Gothic, Neo-Manueline, Neo-Islamic , and Neo-Renaissance.
The
terrace features a sundial cannon that
used to fire every day at noon.
Pena Park:
The Pena Park is a vast forested area completely surrounding the Pena Palace, spreading over 200 hectares of uneven terrain. The park was created at the same time as the palace by King Ferdinand II,.
The exotic taste of Romanticism was applied to the park as it was to the palace. The king ordered trees from diverse, distant lands to be planted there. Those included North American sequoia, Lawson's cypress, magnolia, and Western redcedar, Chinese ginkgo, Japanese Cryptomeria, and a wide variety of ferns and tree ferns from Australia and New Zealand, concentrated in the Queen's Fern Garden (Feteira da Rainha).
