Landscape and Climate

Abstract

In the summer of 1809, a party of six officers from the 34th Cumberland Regiment left their encampment at Belem at four o’clock in the morning, bound for their first venture outside Lisbon. Amongst the party was Lieutenant Moyle Sherer. Despite the pre-dawn start, this journey was not part of the military campaign — it was a sight-seeing trip. Granted two days’ leave, the officers and their servants set off in three cabriolets and with great expectations made for their destination — the village of Sintra, ‘a spot’, Sherer recorded, ‘celebrated by all travellers, and proverbial with the inhabitants of Lisbon, for its romantic beaut)/.ⁿ Five hours after leaving Lisbon, the officers glimpsed their first sight of Sintra and entered another world entirely, far removed from the stinking metropolis on the Tagus: