The Enchanted Moura of Sintra

Portuguese folklore is full of mouras encantadas, enchanted women who guard treasure beside springs and comb golden hair with golden combs. Sintra's claim on them is older and stranger than that. In Gil Vicente's play Triunfo do Inverno, performed before King Joao III around 1529 and printed in 1562, the Serra de Sintra walks on stage as a character and says in her own voice that she holds treasures that "ficarao encantados, delles de tempo de mouros" - enchanted, some from the time of the Moors and some from the ancestors. It is the earliest datable claim of enchanted Moorish treasure at Sintra, and there is no moura in it: what the mountain guards is a pagan prince held by a magician for a thousand years and three months. The word moura reaches Sintra in print only in 1838, in the Visconde de Juromenha's Cintra Pinturesca, in the plural and without a story; the golden comb and the night of Saint John arrive later still, in a footnote written as a joke. This page follows that chain link by link, and says plainly where it runs out.

Sintra's enchanted treasure has a first text, it is dated, and it is a stage play. In the second part of Gil Vicente's "Triunfo do Inverno" — printed in the "Copilaçam de todalas obras de Gil Vicente" (Lisbon, 1562) and conventionally dated to 1529, when it was performed before King Joao III at the birth of a daughter of Queen Catarina — the Serra de Sintra walks on as a character and speaks in the first person. Summer courts her; she asks him for a gift worthy of the Queen and answers with her own inventory: "Eu tenho muitos tisouros, / Que lhe poderao ser dados, / Mas ficarao encantados, / Delles de tempo de mouros, / Delles dos antepassados." That is the earliest datable statement that the mountain of Sintra holds enchanted treasure from the time of the Moors, and it is four centuries older than any guidebook. Read whole rather than summarised, the passage does not contain a moura. What the Serra guards is a man: "Hum filho de hum Rei passado / Dos gentios Portugueses / Tenho eu muito guardado, / Ha mil annos e tres meses / Per hum magico encantado" — a prince of the pre-Christian Portuguese, held a thousand years and three months by a male magician, together with a garden of the earthly paradise that Solomon is said to have sent to a king of Portugal. The spell carries no comb and no mortal who snatches it: it ends "quando a bella foi nacida", when the royal child was born, which is the compliment the whole play exists to pay. The dancers who close the scene sing "Quem diz que nao he este / San Joao o verde?", so midsummer is in the text from the start. The word moura reaches Sintra much later, and when it does it arrives in the plural and without a story. In "Cintra Pinturesca" (Lisbon, 1838), the Visconde de Juromenha writes of the ruined Castelo dos Mouros that the people fill it with "esses fantasmas tao conhecidos entre nos com o nome de mouros e mouras encantados", believe there are enchanted treasures there, and hold that a king lies buried in a sarcophagus with all his riches, guarded by "genios malfazejos". Juromenha then cites Gil Vicente to prove how old the tradition is — correctly for the treasure, and without evidence for the mouras, who are not in the verses he quotes. The golden comb and the night of Saint John only surface at Sintra in the second, annotated edition of the same book (1905), inside a footnote whose material its editor, Antonio Augusto Rodrigues da Cunha, credits to Camilo Castelo Branco's notes to "A Formosa Lusitania" (Porto, 1877), his annotated version of Lady Jackson's "Fair Lusitania" (London, 1874). The sentence runs: "A lenda popular de que as filhas do crescente se lavam e penteam, por noutes de S. Joao, no espaldo das montanhas, mirando-se no crystal das correntes" — and it is a joke, the punchline being that they therefore washed once a year. Lady Jackson's English book contains nothing of the kind. Meanwhile the folklorists who were collecting mouras in the 1880s put them everywhere except here. Consiglieri Pedroso's "As mouras encantadas" (1881) locates them at Penela, Caldas da Rainha, Silves, Moncorvo, Braganca, the Citania; Jose Leite de Vasconcelos's "Tradicoes populares de Portugal" (1882) adds Penafiel, Torre de Dona Chama, Tondela, Briteiros, Mondim da Beira, Lamego and Galicia. The standard portrait comes from those pages: mouras combing golden hair with golden combs beside springs, appearing at dawn on Saint John's day, winding skeins of gold, a loom heard working inside a cistern, mouras who spin with the distaff at their waist while carrying stones on their heads to build convents and towers, and the "bichas mouras" who offer a choice between their eyes and their golden scissors. The one Sintra spring that does carry a documented legend carries a different one. The 1905 appendix records that the water of the Fonte da Sabuga was held to work like Lethe: whoever drinks it before any other water forgets the land he came from and never wants to leave Sintra, whence the local saying "Aquelle bebeu a agua da Sabuga!". The same pages record the prosaic reason the spring mattered — in May 1868 the town council levied one real per litre on water exported from the municipality, the Lisbon water dealers appealed and won four years later, and the council's pleadings note that they sold it at ten reis a glass. The named Sintra moura who circulates today, Zaida of the Cova Encantada, belongs to a different family again: an alcaide's daughter who loves a captive Christian knight, hides him wounded in a cave and is struck by an arrow while fetching him water, after which a maiden in white is said to appear by the cave on moonlit nights, filling a jug. A blog of Portuguese legends published that version on 25 June 2006, credited to a contributor signing as M. Seleiro, with no printed source. It is a Reconquest romance, and the treasure, the comb and the Saint John's dawn of the 1880s collections are absent from it.

The legend has no site of its own, and the oldest readable prose that ties it to a place, Juromenha's Cintra Pinturesca of 1838, puts the enchanted treasure in the ruins of the Castelo dos Mouros, which is run by Parques de Sintra - Monte da Lua. Parques de Sintra's prices page, read on 24 September 2026, gives the castle's hours as 09:30 to 18:00, with last ticket and last admission at 17:30; the ticket office closes between 12:00 and 13:00, when a ticket machine is available. Tickets cost 12 euros for adults aged 18 to 64, 10 euros for young people aged 6 to 17 and for over-65s, and 33 euros for a family ticket covering two adults and two young people. The castle's own page publishes its GPS position as 38°47'24.25" N, 9°23'21.47" W and says private cars are not allowed on the access roads. It gives bus 434, run by Scotturb, from Sintra railway station, which the CP Sintra line serves from Lisbon's Oriente, Rossio and Entrecampos stations. Of the signposted footpaths, the Santa Maria path, starting from the Info Parques de Sintra point at São Pedro de Sintra, is 1,770 metres long and timed at one hour; the Vila Sassetti path from Largo Ferreira de Castro is 1,850 metres and 45 minutes. The Fonte da Sabuga, whose water the annotated 1905 edition of Cintra Pinturesca says made anyone who drank it forget their homeland and never want to leave Sintra, is a public fountain on Rua Marechal Saldanha, in the town below the castle. OpenStreetMap places it about 600 metres north-north-east of the castle's published GPS point, in a straight line. Of the several places in Portugal named Cova da Moura, the one inside Sintra municipality is a hamlet of São João das Lampas, which OpenStreetMap places about 13 kilometres north-north-west of the centre of Sintra, well away from the Serra. The cave that present-day retellings call the Cova Encantada, home of the moura Zaida, belongs to a different story and is not the subject of this page.