Pena Palace

In 1838 Ferdinand II, the German-born artist-king who was consort to Portugal's Queen Maria II, bought the ruins of a Hieronymite monastery wrecked by the 1755 Lisbon earthquake. Then he hired Baron Wilhelm Ludwig von Eschwege — a mining engineer and amateur architect — and between 1842 and 1854 built something Europe had never seen: a summer palace that fused Neo-Manueline, Neo-Moorish, Neo-Gothic, and Neo-Renaissance into one deliberate, theatrical collision. The old monastery block was painted deep red, the new wing vivid yellow.

Ferdinand intervened personally in the ornament — he designed a window for the main façade himself — and the result refuses categorisation: the grotesque Triton Gateway, the Courtyard of Arches, a surviving 1511 Manueline cloister, azulejo-tiled domes, a drawbridge, and a clock tower, all at 500 metres above the Atlantic. Around it he planted an exotic forest of trees from around the world. UNESCO calls it 'a pure expression of the Romantic Movement,' and Sintra the first centre of European Romantic architecture.

The colours faded to gray through the 20th century and were triumphantly restored in the 1990s. The palace served the royal family until the 1910 revolution — the last queen, Amélia, spent her final night in Portugal here — and became a national monument and museum. Named one of the Seven Wonders of Portugal in 2007, it draws nearly two million visitors a year.