Why go
The surviving convent elements make more sense once you know that Ferdinand built around religious ruins rather than starting with an empty hillside. This history helps you distinguish the older chapel and monastic core from the nineteenth-century palace around them.
The full story
A chapel dedicated to Our Lady of Pena stood on the hill in the Middle Ages; a story of a Marian apparition belongs to the site’s tradition, not to established building history. King John II and Queen Leonor made a pilgrimage here in 1493. Manuel I later ordered a monastery for the Order of Saint Jerome, whose small community lived here for centuries. Lightning and then the 1755 earthquake badly damaged the monastery, though the chapel largely survived. Ferdinand II bought the ruins and neighbouring estates in 1838, including the Castle of the Moors. He asked Baron Wilhelm Ludwig von Eschwege to turn the remains into a summer palace. The work ran mainly from the 1840s into the 1850s, with Ferdinand and Maria II intervening in its symbolism and decoration. After Ferdinand’s death, the palace passed to his second wife, Elisa Hensler, Countess of Edla, before returning to royal ownership. Its layered history is visible in the preserved convent fabric surrounded by a deliberate Romantic reinvention.