Counter-intuitively, I find that spending about 20 minutes before I start writing for the day looking at art I like actually helps the creative flow. I spent yesterday reading quotes by some of my favorite authors, paired with surreal art. It was incredibly inspiring. Today, it's castles.
A lot of the story I'm working on at the moment, being as it is a fantasy, and me being a sucker for a good cliche, takes place in a castle in the middle of war. So this morning, I'm revisiting pictures of the Moorish Castle just outside Sintra, Portugal, another of those magical places for me. In a way, the Castle is what inspired the story I'm writing, even though I only began writing it late last year (so a good two years after visiting Sintra for the first time). I always carried in me the idea of a prince and his sister who live in that fortress. In my story, they're a lot closer to the shore than the Moorish Castle actually is, though there is a spot, along the hill path, outside of the Castle, where you can sit on top of the world and gaze out at the shoreline.
So he was always there, in the back of my head, asking if I could do his story at some point, and I'm glad I waited. As time wore on, his story grew increasingly more complex, until it's no longer just his story anymore.
Moorish Castle
To get to this wonderful hilltop fortress, you can either drive, walk through the forest, or have someone drive you. I'd recommend walking, but packing plenty of water with you, and having your wits about. Last time I went, earlier this year, there was some reconstruction being done to the path, so you essentially had to walk up along the cars, and uphill through the dirt. It was just my kind of fun, and it does give it a unique feeling.
The Moorish Castle nestled inside Sintra's hills is actually older than you'd think, at a neat one millennium old. Perhaps that accounts for the simple, rockbed beauty that I fell in love with. I'm not a fan of fancy, gold-y castles, much preferring the simple all-rock aesthetic of places like this.
The Moorish Castle, according to its legend, was built under Islamic rule (as some may know, being situated right on the cusp between the European and Islamic worlds, Portugal and Spain had a winding, complex history with Islam), as a hilltop vantage point, to guard against attacks.
As I mentioned, sitting snug on the high hills, the Castle allows a bird's-eye view of the water, and implicitly the maritime routes leading to and from Lisbon. But although the Castle was a place of protection, and a vantage point against danger, that didn't limit it. All through the early years following its foundation, the Moorish Castle served as a home to quite a bustling community within its stone walls. If you visit, you can learn a bit about them through artifacts of that period, located in the Islamic Quarter.
As time wore on, in the 1100s, the Castle was passed from its Islamic founders to one Afonso Henriquez (more commonly known as Afonso I, the first king of Portugal). Naturally, once Portugal transitioned to Christian kings, so too did the population inside the Moorish Castle become a predominantly Christian one.
Which actually accounts for my favorite bit of Moorish Castle lore. When Ferdinand II was revamping the Castle in the 19th century, the restoration efforts happened to damage the burial sites at the castle quite significantly. So Ferdinand decided to build a great big tomb, by way of apology, and to commemorate the dead, except he couldn't know which bones were Christian and which had belonged to Muslim inhabitants, so rather than abandoning the project, he built the tomb anyway, and inscribed it with:>
“What man brought together, only God may separate."
...which I think is a very tongue-in-cheek, but also very wholesome end to the story.
For some reason, I'm always drawn to places of rock, no pun intended. There's something safe in their simplicity, I guess, and indeed, all the major places in my own current work are simple rock constructions, much like this Castle.
