Quinta da Bruma, Sintra

We arrived in the late afternoon, when Sintra does the thing the Romantics came for: a soft grey mist sliding down off the Serra, blurring the chimneys of the National Palace and softening every edge. Quinta da Bruma is a 19th-century villa just up from Rua Consiglieri Pedroso, set behind a mossy wall and a gate of curling ironwork, and stepping inside is like stepping into a watercolour. The hall has a painted ceiling, faded blues and garlands, and the air smells of woodsmoke and camellia. A pot of tea and a plate of travesseiros, Sintra's flaky almond pillows, materialised on a marble console while a fire was lit. The mountain pressed quietly at the windows.

The room

Our room looked over the terraced garden toward the green wall of the Serra, and it was the kind of room that makes you want to stay in. The ceiling was hand-painted, restored with a light touch so the patina remained, and tall shuttered windows let the famous mist drift right up to the glass. The bed, a Portuguese four-poster in dark chestnut, wore crisp white linen and a quilted serra-wool throw against the evening chill, the Sintra hills are cool even in May. There was a writing desk, a pair of armchairs by the window, and a small library of Byron and Eça de Queirós. The bathroom, in cool blue-and-white azulejo, held a roll-top tub positioned, perfectly, to watch the fog roll in.

The mist is the third guest in every room, and the villa has the grace to set a place for it.The Suite Edit

Service & food

Service is the quiet star here, warm, anticipatory and entirely unhurried, the kind that remembers how you take your coffee by the second morning and lights your fire without being asked. Breakfast is served in a glass-roofed orangery: eggs, serra cheese, figs, warm broa, honey from hives on the hill. There is no full restaurant, but a short evening menu of petiscos and a thoughtful list of Colares wines, grown in the sandy soil just down the coast, mean you need not venture out into the damp. Afternoon tea is an event in itself. For dinner proper, the concierge books the village's better tables and arranges the short transfer up to the palaces before the crowds.

The verdict

Quinta da Bruma is for romantics and slow travellers, honeymooners, readers, anyone who wants Sintra's misty enchantment with a fire and a roll-top tub to retreat to. The villa is exquisite and the service genuinely caring. The honest caveat is the village rather than the hotel: Sintra's historic centre is one of Europe's most visited day-trip destinations, and from mid-morning the lanes outside fill with coaches and queues. The trick, which the staff will happily orchestrate, is to see the palaces at opening or at dusk and treat the garden as your refuge in between. Do that, and the magic holds.