Why go
The castle ridge and nearby São Pedro de Canaferrim are part of a much older human landscape. Finds at Penha Verde, Quinta das Sequoias and Santa Eufémia da Serra point to different kinds of settlement, burial and exchange across prehistoric periods, rather than a single origin story for the town.
The full story
Evidence of early occupation appears at Penha Verde, while finds near São Pedro de Canaferrim include decorated pottery and small flint tools. Other ceramics in the Sintra Mountains point to Neolithic and Chalcolithic communities around the area of today's town. The sites were not all alike: the record includes open settlements, defended places and burial monuments. Bronze Age traces have been found around Monte do Sereno and on the ground later occupied by the Moorish Castle. A gold neck ring known as the Sintra Collar, found near the town in the nineteenth century, is now in the British Museum. At Santa Eufémia da Serra, Iron Age material shows contact between local groups and the wider Mediterranean world. These discoveries matter most as a change of scale: when looking at the castle and town, remember that their visible medieval forms sit within a landscape used for many centuries before them.