10 Most Haunted Places Of Portugal

Portugal is a country with lots of sun, beaches, good food, and friendly people.

It is also a country with a lot of history and tradition.

Millions of tourists visit the country every year taking advantage of the good weather to visit thousands of points of interest and world-famous historic sites as well as its beautiful cities.

But Portugal also has a darker side and many myths and legends that go back to the beginning of its history.

Monsters, fantastic creatures and ghosts there is a little something for everyone.

Lying under the ever-present sun of Portugal are ruined houses and medieval castles with facades and backgrounds that could give rise to major cases of heebie-jeebies. If you’re visiting Portugal, why not take a train or bus to discover one of the many spooky sights of the country? Whether or not you see spirits, the locations on this list are sure to raise more than a few goosebumps. Who is bold enough to explore the most creepy places in Portugal?

Quinta da Pauliceia

Águeda’s brilliant blue skies and acres of vineyards are usually known. You may not be aware that it also houses one of Portugal’s most haunted houses. Quinta da Pauliceia looks just like one of the hunted houses right out of the movies–a building that has not been decrepit and is surrounded by a barbed iron fence. This house was named after the Town of Sao Paulo and belonged to the family Águedense, the Brazilians.

All the family members died in the 1918 influenza pandemic, with only one surviving family member, who eventually died too, leaving no heir behind. But is it really uninhabited?

What makes this house one of the most disturbing is from neighbors ‘ accounts. While some have heard of shotgun blasts or the neighboring from the property’s stables, some have even felt that something unseen softly brushes their ears.

A caretaker and countless witnesses say they heard strange noises in the house, and a gardener says he had a headache so bad that he never came back.

Spooky… is it not?

Sanitório de Valongo

This is one of Portugal’s abandoned places and it certainly sends a chill down your spine. This as sanatorium was established in 1910. It was during the outbreak of tuberculosis, which spread throughout the nation. Which was intended to hold 50 people, 500 of them ended up living. There was no treatment for this illness at that time and all 500 of them died from the disease.

Antibiotics were later found for the same and the disorder was eradicated entirely. The medical facility, therefore, closed in 1961.

After its closure, it was looted, vandalized and damaged by fires. And is currently abandoned.

Nevertheless, the spirits of those 500 patients are said to hang around the site, and that’s what makes it creepy. The location plays host to paintball matches while haunted. Only think about what that would be like!

Quinta da Juncosa

Well… this tale can easily be made into a movie. That is by far, one of Portugal’s most haunted places. This farmhouse belonged to Baron of Lages, the story goes. His partner was accused of poisoning him and what came next was incomprehensible. He bound her to a horse’s back and pulled her around the farm until she died. Shortly afterward he knew she was in fact innocent. He killed his kids, infected with remorse, before killing himself. Since then people have been saying they’ve seen the couple’s spirits around the house. Eerie.

Casa de Dr. John Pike

This home belonged to the artist, naturalist, and mystic John Pike of the 20th century. Soon afterward, strange things began to happen, more of a disaster. His old mother is thought to have thrown his son (her grandson) out of a window in the house and the young child died. He then left the house, since he could no longer bear living in that room. It’s said, at night, people heard noises of something being pulled across the building and a baby’s voice screaming.

Quinta das Conchas e dos Lilases

In reality, this is a park in northern Lisbon.

With an area of 24 hectares, the park comprises an open area with large lawns and a forested area with places of high landscape value. The present garden was born from the recovery of two farms from the 16th century and is the third-largest green spot in Lisbon, after the Monsanto Forest Park and the Bela Vista Park.

A recent target for requalification, it integrates the old farms of Conchas and Liláses and constitutes the great green space of Lumiar.

There is also an ancient, dilapidated house there, one of Lisbon’s abandoned places. The locals say that in the early 1900s, this whole area was the domain of a wealthy businessman, Francisco Mantero Belard. Residents are said to have detected wailing noises from what seems to be, one of Lisbon’s abandoned places. The story goes that these wailing noises belong to a lady who was a slave and the wealthy businessman raped her. She is thought to have been locked in a small cage for many years and imprisoned.

Bela Vista Hotel

If you wonder what a stunning 5-star hotel is doing in this collection of Portugal’s most haunted places. Let’s warn you that appearances can be deceptive, so obviously that’s one. The Magalhães Barros family built the villa-converted-hotel and spa in the early 1900s, perched atop the cliffs of Praia da Rocha. The elder daughter died in the same villa and was later given to a relative, Henry Bivar de Vasconcelos, who in the 1930s converted this villa into a hotel. The daughter’s footstep screams can be felt in the lobbies of this 5-star hotel. The stories in room 18 are old and based on a strange event. It is said that a guest lived and died there and that the said “spirit” wanders around there during the night.

The floor creaked with other scary sounds. It is said that there were video and audio recordings in an attempt to capture anything.

It is said that the images show nothing, while the sounds are, it seems, perceptible when you hear a man talking.

You are always welcome to stay at the hotel and draw your own conclusions if…you dare.

The Small Castle of São João

This is one of Portugal’s most known legends of haunted places.

Some people have tried to buy the house before, but the ghost’s haunting stories that haunt the property frightened future owners.

Castelinho de São João do Estoril, situated on the line Cascais, in São João and very close to the sea, will be synonymous with the unexplained forever. Those who have visited the house report that inside the house a ghastly noise is made by the sea waves, which alone makes the place very scary.

The oceanfront castle in Estoril has an interesting story. Near this castle was a little blind girl. She seemed to have jumped from the cliff one day when she wondered. Strange things were encountered by local people from that day on. They say they saw a little girl near the cliffs while some people still feel like they’re jumping out of the edge. Some also saw the little girl walking around the castle and the surrounding areas with a doll in her lap. If this doesn’t send you the creeps we don’t know what it’s going to do!

Castelinho is currently inhabited and known as the home of Dr. Cebola. It has been restored and so far there is no news that the family that lives there has experienced any drama or witnessed a phenomenon from beyond.

Casa Amarela

There are a number of stories about why this house is haunted, one of those left abandoned places in Portugal. The first is that this house was home to a father and a daughter and the father was a rather over-protective father. He figured out his daughter was in love with someone and he locked up his daughter and her boyfriend in a pit out of rage, and they were left to die. Since then the lovelorn pair is said to have visited the house.

Yet another version, though not as convincing as the first, is that the father went bankrupt and stopped the bank from taking the house that he constructed lovingly, he killed himself, thereby guaranteeing that he could not take the property away from him.

This way, the word in the neighborhood is that this building is certainly haunted.

The Cemetery of Pleasures

Built-in the romantic period in 1833, this cemetery has been under municipal administration since 1840. Consisting almost exclusively of private deposits.

The Cemitério dos Prazeres was built to accommodate the thousands of mortal victims of the “Morbus cholera” epidemic that devastated Lisbon that year. For reasons of public health, burials in religious spaces were prohibited at that time, as was customary.

The cemetery, built on the western side of Lisbon, where the neighborhoods of aristocratic residences were located, ended up becoming the cemetery for families with more power and influence.

You can admire monuments by anonymous authors, side by side with pieces by renowned architects from the 19th century to the present day.

This other location in the city may not be cursed in the true sense, but it still gives you the creeps. Completed in the 19th century, just after the epidemic of cholera, this final resting place for thousands of people is going to give you jitters. The tombs, which are mostly above the ground and are basically in the style of buildings. The tombs have openings that could even render you lucky, or, in this situation, unlucky, to get a snapshot of the decayed skeletons. Perhaps contributing to the eeriness of the location is the large area of this cemetery.

Termas de Água Radium

At a period when radioactive materials were thought to have healing powers, a hotel and a spa was built in Sortelha.

The majestic remains of a resort hotel in Serra da Pena take us to two decades of intense commitment to curing ills with healing waters. They originated in three springs and their qualities were found in the twenties of the twentieth century.

As in so many many areas, here too, this assurance of recovery and relaxation was only within sight of the small scope of the wealthy, and the elegance of Hotel Serra da Pena (or Hotel Termal Águas Radium, as it was also called) shows that. The house, built-in granite stone, had a brownish profile from which a colossal multi-story tower stuck out, of which only the front was left. This is the first thing you can see when you head up the dirt road that leads to the hot springs.

Maybe this one has the best story among all the sites–one packed with deception and destiny. The site was built by the Spanish Count Don Rodrigo, in the expectation that the natural healing element in the water here could relieve his daughter of damaging skin disease. Word spread far and wide, and the site was turned into a resort, which thousands of people would come to cure their bodies. Something they didn’t know was that the lakes still contained nuclear materials attributable to a uranium mine a few miles away. It was found a few decades later and the spa was demolished, but many people died for obvious reasons. It is said that this location is inhabited by a very large number of spirits.