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Buçaco Palace

Buildings and structures in Aveiro DistrictBuildings and structures in MealhadaHotels in PortugalNational monuments in Aveiro DistrictPalaces in Portugal
Royal residences in Portugal
Palace Hotel do Bussaco
Palace Hotel do Bussaco

The Buçaco Palace is a former convent that today houses a luxury hotel located in the Buçaco mountain range, in the municipality of Mealhada, in central Portugal. It is a national monument.

Excerpt from the Wikipedia article Buçaco Palace (License: CC BY-SA 3.0, Authors, Images).

Buçaco Palace
Cruz Alta, Mealhada

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Wikipedia: Buçaco PalaceContinue reading on Wikipedia

Geographical coordinates (GPS)

Latitude Longitude
N 40.376038888889 ° E -8.36545 °
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Address

Cruz Alta
3050-224 Mealhada
Portugal
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Palace Hotel do Bussaco
Palace Hotel do Bussaco
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Buçaco Forest
Buçaco Forest

Buçaco Forest (Portuguese: Mata Nacional do Buçaco) is an ancient, walled arboretum in the Centro region of Portugal and home to one of the finest dendrological collections in Europe. The forest measures 1450 meters by 950 meters and covers an area of 105 hectares; the perimeter wall is approximately 5 kilometres (3.1 mi) in circumference and punctuated by a series of gates, one of which bears the text of 17th-century papal bulls forbidding women to enter and threatening to excommunicate anyone harming the trees, though neither stipulation is currently legally binding under Portuguese law. More than 250 tree and shrub species grow in the forest, including huge centenarians and exotics introduced by Portuguese mariners during the Age of Discovery. In 2004 Portugal submitted Buçaco Forest to UNESCO's tentative list of World Heritage Sites. Many of the forest's trees have been discussed in popular and academic literature. In 1634, for example, a Portuguese scholar authored a collection of poems that mentioned Buçaco's cypresses; in 1768 an English botanist provoked a 200-year-long debate by claiming one of the forest's cypress varieties originated in Goa; in the late 1990s wine writer Hugh Johnson visited the arboretum and described a Tasmanian mountain ash as "surely Europe's most magnificent"; more recently, historian and arborist Thomas Pakenham included one of the forest's bunya pines in his book, Remarkable Trees of the World. Buçaco Forest was once home to Discalced Carmelites: the monks built a convent, small chapels and the encircling walls, and tended the arboretum until the dissolution of the monasteries in 1834. At the end of the 19th century much of the convent was demolished to make way for an extravagant neo-Manueline palace. The palace was conceived as a retreat for the Portuguese royal family, but after the Lisbon Regicide and subsequent coup d'état it was converted to a luxury hotel, the Buçaco Palace.

Serra do Buçaco
Serra do Buçaco

Serra do Bussaco ( pronounced [buˈsaku]) is a mountain range in Portugal, formerly included in the province of Beira Litoral. The highest point in the range is the Cruz Alta at 549 m (1801 feet), which has views over the Serra da Estrela, the Mondego River valley and the Atlantic Ocean. The Serra includes the buildings of a secularized Carmelite monastery, founded in 1628. The convent woods have long been known for their cypress, plane, evergreen oak, cork and other forest trees, many of which have stood for centuries and attained an immense size. A bull of Pope Gregory XV (1623), anathematizing trespassers and forbidding women to approach, is inscribed on a tablet at the main entrance; another bull, of Pope Urban VIII (1643), threatens with excommunication any person harming the trees. Located in the northwestern corner is the Mata Nacional do Bussaco (Bussaco Forest), an ancient walled arboretum. Towards the close of the 19th century the Serra de Bussaco became one of the regular halting-places for foreign, and especially for British, tourists, on the overland route between Lisbon and Porto. The Palace Hotel of Bussaco (Palácio Hotel do Bussaco), built between 1888 and 1905 in an exuberant Neo-Manueline style, still attracts tourists.In 1873 a monument was erected, on the southern slopes of the Serra, to commemorate the Battle of Bussaco, in which the French, under Marshal Masséna, were defeated by the Anglo-Portuguese Army, under Lord Wellington, on 27 September 1810.