Sintra
Ok, so the first morning of our trip to Lisbon we go.... somewhere else. Sure, technically, Sintra is now part of Lisbon, since Lisbon has certainly grown in the last 500 years since Sintra was the capital, and it's own city. It's picturesque to say the least. Set in forested hills, with two castles/palaces looking down from the crests on the city nestled in a little valley with the National Palace in the center.
The Palace that we visited was built in the late 14th century, and I believe that it housed the Portuguese royal family for at least part of the year for at 200 more years after that. The age would explain why, for a Royal Palace, it's really not all that luxurious. The furniture looks uncomfortable to say the least, and the rooms are big, and drafty, and currently lacking rugs and tapestries. I assume that there were lots of these earlier on, otherwise it's a miracle that any of the royals survived the winters.
The most interesting part of this palace was definitely the wall art. At Versailles there is gilt everywhere and crazy wall paintings. Sintra, on the other hand, has tiled walls and mosaics in most of the rooms. They vary, with some being fairly simple, and others extremely complex. In some cases, the tiles were painted, and then put together on the walls, which makes it suitably complex for royalty. In some of the more grand rooms, you get the gilt on the ceilings and paintings too. But all in all, this really did feel like a post-mediaeval/pre-Renaissance Palace. Not the great splendor of a palace at a later date, but not stone and tapestry like an earlier example might have had.
Of course, examples of the others are looking down on it from the hilltops. Funny story that, actually.