Fairy Tale Pena Palace

by Joan Carroll

Title

Fairy Tale Pena Palace

Artist

Joan Carroll

Medium

Photograph - Digital Art

Description

You climb up some ancient walls at the Moorish Castle in Sintra (near Lisbon Portugal) and then you see you can climb higher still. The views of the Atlantic Ocean as you climb higher and higher are stunning. You keep climbing higher and higher, then you look UP and see the Pena Palace so much higher than where you already are, perched on a hilltop. The Pena Palace (Palacio Nacional da Pena, The Feather Palace) is a flamboyant complex that was commissioned by an artistic king. Each section of the exterior is individually styled with vivid colours and fine stone carvings. It is one of the seven wonders of Portugal, and no wonder! It is also a UNESCO World Heritage site and a national monument and constitutes one of the major expressions of 19th-century Romanticism in the world. The palace was built in such a way as to be visible from any point in the park, which consists of a forest and luxuriant gardens with over five hundred different species of trees originating from the four corners of the earth. The palace's history started in the Middle Ages when a chapel dedicated to Our Lady of Pena was built on the top of the hill above Sintra. According to tradition, construction occurred after an apparition of the Virgin Mary. For centuries Pena was a small, quiet place for meditation, housing a maximum of eighteen monks. In the 18th century the monastery was severely damaged by lightning and then by the Great Lisbon Earthquake of 1755, reducing it to ruins. It wasn't until the mid-19th century that it was acquired and restored by the royal family as a summer residence,

FEATURED PHOTO, Artist News group, 12/1/15

Uploaded

November 12th, 2015

Statistics

Viewed 3,093 Times  -  Last Visitor from Vancouver, BC - Canada on 04/19/2024 at 7:11 PM

Colors

Embed

Share

Sales Sheet

Tags