Penha Longa Resort – a monastery turned Three-Key resort above Sintra

Forty minutes west of Lisbon, where the Sintra-Cascais Natural Park closes in around cork oak and granite, Penha Longa Resort is built around a cluster of monastic buildings that predate the hotel by six centuries. It remains the only hotel inside this protected park, its 204 rooms, apartments and suites set across roughly 545 acres of parkland and championship fairway. The story starts with Hieronymite friars who founded a monastery here in the fourteenth century, seeking solitude in these hills; a chapel followed around 1400, and in the nineteenth century the Marquis of Marialva rebuilt the estate into a grand private retreat before it opened as a Ritz-Carlton-managed resort in 1993. Today the MICHELIN Guide places Penha Longa among Portugal's most distinguished addresses with Three Keys, its top rating for hotels, and two of its restaurants, LAB by Sergi Arola and Midori, each hold their own MICHELIN star.

01The house

The monastery that gives the resort its name was raised in the fourteenth century by Hieronymite friars, who settled on these slopes above Sintra to live apart from the court and the coast below. Its church and chapel, finished around 1400, still stand within the grounds, their tiled walls and cloisters surviving centuries of change. The estate took on a grander character in the nineteenth century, when the Marquis of Marialva remade it into a private retreat with formal gardens and ornate interiors, and it later served as a retreat for Portuguese royalty before the hotel opened in 1993 under what is now the Ritz-Carlton brand.

Beyond the chapel, paths lead through the Nuncio's Garden, a Renaissance-style plot built to be walked rather than worked, with views onto the convent church of São Jerónimo, home to one of Portugal's foremost private collections of azulejo tiles. The whole estate sits inside the Sintra-Cascais Natural Park, a UNESCO World Heritage landscape that Penha Longa alone, among hotels in the area, is permitted to occupy.

02Rooms and suites

The resort counts 204 rooms, apartments and suites, each opening onto a private balcony that looks either over the Natural Park's tree line or across the golf course. For its thirtieth anniversary, Penha Longa renovated 187 of those rooms and suites and added four new three-bedroom family apartments, refreshing interiors while keeping the low, villa-like scale of the original wings. At the top of the range, Signature Suites such as the Sintra and Cascais suites add sitting rooms and dressing areas, while the Presidential Suite looks either onto the golf course or directly onto the old monastery.

Insider tip

Open all year; the spa and the two MICHELIN-starred restaurants need advance booking.

03Where to eat

Penha Longa spreads its kitchens across seven restaurants and lounges, two of which hold a MICHELIN star. LAB by Sergi Arola seats just 22 diners in an intimate room, offering three tasting menus alongside a wine list of more than 550 references and a glass-walled cellar at its centre. Midori, built around Japanese technique and Portuguese produce, serves its tasting menus behind full-height windows onto the forested Sintra Mountains. Lighter and more informal, Spices draws on Chinese, Japanese, Indian and Thai cooking, Arola turns chef Sergi Arola's cooking into tapas-format plates in a relaxed room, and Penha Longa Mercatto keeps things Mediterranean for family dinners.

04The bar

B Lounge, the hotel's lobby bar, runs from afternoon tea built around Portuguese pastries through to an evening cocktail list, with a terrace that spills toward the gardens on warmer nights.

05Spa and wellbeing

The Penha Longa Spa & Wellness occupies the former sixteenth-century royal lodgings built for King Manuel I, a detail still visible in the proportions of its garden pavilions. Natura Bissé treatments, meditation areas set around water, a jacuzzi and seven treatment rooms are arranged around Zen principles rather than a standard hotel-spa layout. Outside, the gardens hold a contrast pool, a small waterfall and what is described as Portugal's only Meditation Labyrinth, a walking path laid out for quiet, repetitive movement.

06The neighbourhood

Golf is built into the estate rather than added to it: the 27-hole course was laid out by Robert Trent Jones Jr., its fairways threading past sections of centuries-old ruins left from the monastery's working lands. The nine-hole Monastery course makes a shorter warm-up before the full eighteen holes of the Atlantic Championship Course. Beyond the gates, Sintra's UNESCO-listed old town and its palaces are a fifteen-minute drive, with the beaches of Cascais and Estoril roughly ten minutes further on and central Lisbon about half an hour away.

07Making the most of a stay

The monastery itself is largely reserved for private events and weddings, but it is worth asking at the desk about seeing its tiled interiors and the chapel dating to 1400 when nothing is booked. Golfers can combine rounds on both courses with time in the spa's gardens, while families can use the resort's play areas before dinner at Penha Longa Mercatto. For something to take home, The Chocolate by Penha Longa sells pieces made on site, a short walk from the lobby.

For a weekend. For a lifetime.