PALACE of BUSSACO

A nights stay will cost from£90.00, however you could have three course lunch for thirty five euros and soak up the atmosphere in the splendor of the dining room. The forest has trails running though it, with chapels, ponds and fountains, with the valley of ferns and the Via Sacre path taking you up to the Cruz Alta 540 metere high giving a magnificent view.

It appears the the kings Swiss chef was granted permission to turn the Palace into a hotel in 1910, as it still is today, exuding opulence and grandeur for a price.

Towards the end of the 1800’s, the Portuguese royal family commissioned the fairy tale Palace with its turrets and spires, and panels of tiles depicting scenes from the poem Os Lusiados,as a summer retreat and hunting lodge. Their enjoyment of the finished Palace, completed as recently as 1907, was short lived, as with the assassination of the king and crown prince, the monarchy was abolished.

However in 1834 the monastery became part of the state when religious orders were abolished.

In the Peninsular War 66.000 French troops attacked the Duke of Wellington and his army of British and Portuguese soldiers in their attempt to invade Portugal and were beaten off. The forest and monastery survived and a re-enactment takes place here every 27th of September.

It became so famous the in 1643 that the Pope Urban VIII passed an edict that anyone found damaging the trees would be excommunicated. The program of expanding the species of the forest and setting out the gardens continued until 1810 when there was the Peninsular war.

Bussaco was first settled by Benedictine monks in the 6th century but the forestation was not embarked upon until in 1628 when the Carmelite monks began a program of developing their surroundings by planting the forest, building a monastery and surrounding the the whole the whole site with a wall.

The Palace is set in the National Park of  Bussaco 24 kilometers northeast of Coimbra, close to the spa town of Luso. The Palace is set in a forest of 105 hectares on the mountain slopes of the Serra do Bucaco and today boasts 700 plus different species of trees, of which about four hundred are supposed to be indigenous and a further three species have been imported from far away lands.