On the very edge of the Cabo da Roca, the most western extremity of Europe where the Serra de Sintra ends in a high cliff, there is a stone inscription of a line from Camões: “Onde a terra acaba e o mar começa” (where the land ends and the sea begins). To state the obvious, one might too easily say to that; missing the poetic point; we take for granted soaring across the Atlantic to the other side in the space of a few hours and isolated completely from the elements. At the beginning of the fifteenth century, the ocean was not only infinite as far as anyone knew but fraught with every peril. Only a brave man would depart out of the comforting sight of land, and a much braver one proceed deliberately into the unknown in a small wooden boat.
A new king, Manuel I, assumed the throne in 1495 and completed the preparations for a voyage to India and a monopoly of the spice trade. On July 8, 1497, a fleet of four ships commanded by Vasco da Gama set sail from Belém on the outskirts of Lisbon. The expedition was carefully organized, each ship having the best captains and pilots and hand-picked crews. They carried the most up-to-date nautical charts and navigational instruments. Vasco da Gama's fleet rounded the Cape of Good Hope on November 27, 1497, and made landfall at Natal in present-day South Africa on December 25. The fleet then proceeded along the east coast of Africa until an Arab pilot was found to direct it to India, where after another month it landed at Calicut on the Malabar coast. In August, after venturing up to Goa, the boats returned to Portugal, arriving back two years and two days after departure. In 1500 D Manuel organized a larger fleet of thirteen ships for a second voyage to India, this time commanded by Pedro Álvares Cabral and including Bartolomeu Dias, various nobles, priests, and 1,200 men. Sailing off-course southwest for a month they arrived unexpectedly on the coast of Brazil. Cabral sent a ship back to Lisbon to report to D Manuel his discovery, which he called Vera Cruz. The fleet then re-crossed the Atlantic to India. After four months there, and leaving behind a contingent of Portuguese to maintain a factory at Cochin, Cabral returned to Lisbon. The Portuguese empire had been established by the very beginning of the sixteenth century and rapidly spread to include as well as Africa, India and Brazil various outposts in the East Indies, along the coast of Southern Arabia and in China . It didn’t last very long, because the Portuguese were rather foolish economically speaking, the population of the country was simply insufficient to control it, and after a disastrous crusade to Morocco led by the unbalanced twenty-year-old D Sebastião and from which few if any of his army of 24,000 returned it had become impossible. Anyway, Sebastião as the last of his line left Portugal open to a Spanish takeover, and in 1580 by legitimate right of succession Felipe II of Castile became also Felipe I of Portugal. During the next sixty years, Portugal was unwillingly involved in the imperial ambitions of Spain, riddled with internal dissentions of its own, and had to watch helplessly as many of its former possessions and international contacts were grabbed up first by the Dutch and then by the English. For a short period, though, it had been as lucrative as it was glorious: Apart from the slaves, the pepper, the dye-wood, the sugar and all the rest of it there was a lot of gold to be picked up and a lot of fortunes to be made and a lot of heroics to relate. It’s no wonder the Portuguese have never ceased to regret what they once were and once had.
D. Manuel gave his name to a unique style of architectural decoration employing maritime motifs, twisted garlands of ropes and seaweed with shells and tritons and so on, of which the windows of the Palaçio Nacional in Sintra are a good, if not the best, example. Raised over some sort of Arab foundation, this architecturally-lumpy but visually-commanding edifice, with its extraordinary double conical chimneys – which always seem to bring forth various predictable associations to post-Freudian generations - sits on a prominent bluff where it is recognizable for miles around. Enough building had been going on since the second half of the twelfth century for D Manuel to have received there in all due state the news of Cabral’s great new discovery. Six years later he initiated a major programme of construction which saw a new façade pierced with the characteristic windows, the Sala dos Brasões and a re-decoration of the chapel; another programme under his successor D João III saw additional ornamented rooms; and a court having been permanently established, extensions, re-modeling and adaptations continued until the earthquake, giving a warren-like and multi-angled effect. The date of the enormous chimneys, adequate to roast whole herds of animals, seems to be unknown, but presumably they were they from the beginnings. The earthquake necessitated considerable repairs in the ‘antique’ style, to all intents and purposes successfully, but D João V and his crazy daughter Maria I had their hands full building more magnificent and up-to-date palaces elsewhere (those of Mafra and Queluz respectively) Queen Maria II and her German Consort set themselves up in the old Sintra Palace while yet another vast edifice, Pena, was being raised from its crags. The last King and Queen of Portugal used the Sintra palace occasionally in the summer; thanks to their predecessors they already had several others to choose from within a twenty mile radius, and a good deal of their time must have been taken up moving from one to the other. With the declaration of the Republic in 1911, the State took over them all, and now collects a fair revenue from regimented queues of gawpers at past splendours.
A number of high dignitaries and camp-followers would inevitably have followed the royal court to Sintra, and a town of sorts have developed around it, but what that was like we can’t say because almost all of it has been replaced much later. The single exception is a very substantial mansion close by the Palaçio, the Paço dos Ribafrias or Casa Pombal depending on which earlier or later occupant is being referred to. This house was built around 1534 by one of D Manuel’s officials who had been elevated to high rank and awarded the land for whatever services were rendered, and is still ostensibly in fine original condition. It must have been very well made, because it seems to be the only building that was not affected, or not seriously affected, by the earthquake. The same Gaspar Gonçalves a year or two later built another very fine house, the Quinta da Ribafria, a little distance out of the town in what would have been then, and still is in a way, the countryside. Almost unknown, separated by a kind of moat from a minor road and visible only through an intervening bosquet, this lovely little palace used to offer a tantalizingly-convincing glimpse of rustic sixteenth-century aristocratic existence now only partly diminished since 1987 by its institutional status.
It seems likely that as early as the sixteenth century Sintra was being parcelled out amongst those fortunate enough to grab them into the tracts of forest that became the quintas that help determine it’s special quality. Perhaps the most notable of these early estates is the Quinta de Penha Verde, in a prime position on the slopes of the Serra and a gift from the king to D João de Castro. The gift was extended by Manuel’s heir after D João’s successful combat against a band of Mediterranean pirates, and he went on from there to become in 1548 Vice-Roy of Portuguese India, dying three weeks after his appointment according to the Inventário. There was a story that Penha Verde was given as a compensation to D João for his shaving off his beard for some sacrificial reason or other of national importance, but that seems more in the nature of romance than historical fact; and another romantic story, that the first orange tree imported to Europe was planted in the grounds where it not only became the parent of all others but still thrives, is even less plausible. Certainly, the Quinta is exactly the sort of place to encourage legends of a fanciful nature as one passes it by a narrow lane within high crumbling walls from which gnarled vegetation is sprouting and under an arched bridge surmounted by a cross. That and an elegant classical portal give little indication of the palatial conditions beyond, but it was always a complaint of curious but excluded visitors to Sintra that ‘interesting’ views were impeded by walls and closed gates. In the seventeenth-century a grandson of the original de Castro who was appointed Chief Inquisitor made extensive ‘improvements’ to the property, but by the time I came here it was almost in a ruinous condition and I used to wander around in the adjoining woods collecting chestnuts, without being able to find the mythical orange tree. A little later it was acquired by one of the international financial persons who were appearing at that time. The Portuguese State, as a condition of handing over a national monument, decreed amongst other things that the library be completely restored – a fairly daunting requirement, as this was a large salon lined from floor to ceiling on four sides with renaissance shelving. The condition was accomplished with all due respect thanks to expert advice and the finest materials – except that the new owner was evidently not of a literary mind, and instead of the thousands of leather-bound volumes that the library must once have held, there was only a mournful set of plastic-covered encyclopaedias and half-a-dozen paper-back ‘thrillers’. More depressing, the other rooms had been painted sterile white and filled with a few pieces of fluffed-up furniture that might have come from the Tottenham Court Road in the late ‘fifties. The gardens, flatteringly said to have cost a ‘fortune’, were all tidied up and set with concealed electric lighting to assist the activities of twenty or so security guards, though what they had to protect remained mysterious. Oh well, we can’t have everything; I suppose it’s better that the building more or less remains – is it? - than to be replaced by concrete apartments for inferior nouveaux-riches. There was no more chestnut-gathering, though, the woods are barred where no-one goes to see with barbed wire barricades. These manorial premises in their day harboured and sustained numerous dependants and the owners were not so proud – or should I say they were proud enough not - to decline the fruits of their earth and to share them in common humanity. That’s a very far cry from processed prawns in the first class cabins of airliners and a paranoid dread of fossickers getting ‘something for nothing’.
One other early quinta, mercifully, has fared better, that of dos Pisões, not far from the Palaçio. The house in some ways looks startlingly modern, almost as if it could have been designed by a very inspired and original architect of the nineteen thirties or forties, but a very beautiful stone surround to an unassuming street entrance is engraved in one corner 1533. The decoration of this gateway - exquisitely chiseled men-in-the moon and entwined salamander motifs - is quite unique in Portugal and bears, I would say, all the marks except perhaps its whimsicality of Italian workmanship. Amazingly, it’s almost undamaged and almost as crisp as when it was set there, possibly because barely anyone bothers to notice it. Hundreds of people troop right past it daily, their eyes everywhere else if not looking out for the cars also hurtling past a sharp bend in a lane where they have no business to be. This little detail of loving craftsmanship is a poignant reminder of how ‘progress’ is accomplished at the expense of artistic skill and sensibility; no-one on earth could do anything like it any more. There are no official details available about the history of this house or what later modifications it underwent. Local lore concerns itself only with the belief that is it ‘haunted’, that every so often a shower of stones descends within it. I’ve no idea how the occupants deal with this annoying phenomenon. It’s true that the land descends steeply below into a particularly gloomy and deeply forested ravine, which could perhaps encourage excitable fantasies; doubtless, also, that dark deeds have taken place within the precincts.
One other relic from the Age of the Discoveries or earlier – the Hospital da Misericórdia – still occupies one side of the Palace Square and still deals with passing medical emergencies. In fact, a hospital existed here as far back as the thirteenth or fourteenth centuries in response to outbursts of the Plague, which made no distinction between residents in palaces or elsewhere. In 1545 the queen of João III organized a ‘co-fraternity of the Holy House of Charity’, whatever that was exactly, and caused a chapel to be erected next to or within the Hospital. Supporting charities that tended the sick and looked after the aged and indigent was a favourite queenly occupation, in the absence of much else a valuable one, and several Portuguese royal ladies have achieved sanctity or fame, perhaps rightly, for their generosity and benevolence in this respect. Both the hospital and the chapel suffered serious damage in the earthquake, and the present buildings are therefore largely of the eighteenth century. .Ít’s a nice touch, though, that palace and infirmary have continued in such proximity for so long.
The village of Colares, six or so kilometers further on towards the sea, was another centre of rural estates on account of its lovely position on the sunny flanks of the serra, more ‘pastoral’ and less dramatic than Sintra itself. For the very diligent seeker, a renaissance arch and a doorway can be discovered there, neither very remarkable. On the side of the road between, however, in what is presently a rather amateurish ‘gardening centre’, stand the ruins of a more imposing house, the Casa das Lafetás or the Quinta do Cosme. It was built in 1556 by a Milanese merchant married to a Portuguese wife and on what would have been then, one imagines, a fairly isolated site. Descendants of the original Lafetás were under suspicion at a stage of concealing Jewish blood, and were interrogated by the Holy Office, otherwise known as the Inquisition, with what consequences are not recorded. Nor is it clear what happened to their house. I have the impression it’s destruction is comparatively recent and that what remains is little more than an eyesore to the occupants of the new ‘country villas’ that have regrettably sprung up around it in the last ten years.
Portuguese historians like to debate the motivations that impelled their ancestors across the dangerous and unknown seas. To the usual ingredients of avarice, commercial profiteering, the desire for military glory and self-advancement, religious fanaticism and missionary proselytizing and so on has to be added the more noble one of intellectual curiosity and adventure, because by then Europe was emerging from the Dark Ages into that era of civilized self-aware humanitarianism of which we are presently seeing the end. The first Portuguese kings, with their expansionist or crusading designs on Arab territories and with their unique maritime kingdom, had from the beginning been interested in establishing a national navy, so that by the time Principe Henrique (known to every schoolboy as ‘the Navigator’ and who was, incidentally, the grandson of Shakespeare’s John of Gaunt from Richard II) founded his school for sailors in Sagres in 1418 the ground – or rather the vessels and the instruments and the human propulsion – had already been prepared. Soon discovering the uninhabited islands of Madeira and the Azores, the caravels then explored further year by year down the western coast of Africa, building their forts and picking up black slaves on the way. Finally in 1487, Bartolemeu Dias rounded the Cape of Good Hope and proved that the Atlantic and Indian Oceans were connected and that a sea route to India was accessible instead of the arduous and even more dangerous overland crossing. In the meantime, other of the Portuguese were attempting to overcome Morocco and had managed to reach Ethiopia by land, gaining more valuable trading concessions in the course of pursuing the legendary Christian kingdom of Prester John in search of allies against the Arabs.
A new king, Manuel I, assumed the throne in 1495 and completed the preparations for a voyage to India and a monopoly of the spice trade. On July 8, 1497, a fleet of four ships commanded by Vasco da Gama set sail from Belém on the outskirts of Lisbon. The expedition was carefully organized, each ship having the best captains and pilots and hand-picked crews. They carried the most up-to-date nautical charts and navigational instruments. Vasco da Gama's fleet rounded the Cape of Good Hope on November 27, 1497, and made landfall at Natal in present-day South Africa on December 25. The fleet then proceeded along the east coast of Africa until an Arab pilot was found to direct it to India, where after another month it landed at Calicut on the Malabar coast. In August, after venturing up to Goa, the boats returned to Portugal, arriving back two years and two days after departure. In 1500 D Manuel organized a larger fleet of thirteen ships for a second voyage to India, this time commanded by Pedro Álvares Cabral and including Bartolomeu Dias, various nobles, priests, and 1,200 men. Sailing off-course southwest for a month they arrived unexpectedly on the coast of Brazil. Cabral sent a ship back to Lisbon to report to D Manuel his discovery, which he called Vera Cruz. The fleet then re-crossed the Atlantic to India. After four months there, and leaving behind a contingent of Portuguese to maintain a factory at Cochin, Cabral returned to Lisbon. The Portuguese empire had been established by the very beginning of the sixteenth century and rapidly spread to include as well as Africa, India and Brazil various outposts in the East Indies, along the coast of Southern Arabia and in China . It didn’t last very long, because the Portuguese were rather foolish economically speaking, the population of the country was simply insufficient to control it, and after a disastrous crusade to Morocco led by the unbalanced twenty-year-old D Sebastião and from which few if any of his army of 24,000 returned it had become impossible. Anyway, Sebastião as the last of his line left Portugal open to a Spanish takeover, and in 1580 by legitimate right of succession Felipe II of Castile became also Felipe I of Portugal. During the next sixty years, Portugal was unwillingly involved in the imperial ambitions of Spain, riddled with internal dissentions of its own, and had to watch helplessly as many of its former possessions and international contacts were grabbed up first by the Dutch and then by the English. For a short period, though, it had been as lucrative as it was glorious: Apart from the slaves, the pepper, the dye-wood, the sugar and all the rest of it there was a lot of gold to be picked up and a lot of fortunes to be made and a lot of heroics to relate. It’s no wonder the Portuguese have never ceased to regret what they once were and once had.
D. Manuel gave his name to a unique style of architectural decoration employing maritime motifs, twisted garlands of ropes and seaweed with shells and tritons and so on, of which the windows of the Palaçio Nacional in Sintra are a good, if not the best, example. Raised over some sort of Arab foundation, this architecturally-lumpy but visually-commanding edifice, with its extraordinary double conical chimneys – which always seem to bring forth various predictable associations to post-Freudian generations - sits on a prominent bluff where it is recognizable for miles around. Enough building had been going on since the second half of the twelfth century for D Manuel to have received there in all due state the news of Cabral’s great new discovery. Six years later he initiated a major programme of construction which saw a new façade pierced with the characteristic windows, the Sala dos Brasões and a re-decoration of the chapel; another programme under his successor D João III saw additional ornamented rooms; and a court having been permanently established, extensions, re-modeling and adaptations continued until the earthquake, giving a warren-like and multi-angled effect. The date of the enormous chimneys, adequate to roast whole herds of animals, seems to be unknown, but presumably they were they from the beginnings. The earthquake necessitated considerable repairs in the ‘antique’ style, to all intents and purposes successfully, but D João V and his crazy daughter Maria I had their hands full building more magnificent and up-to-date palaces elsewhere (those of Mafra and Queluz respectively) Queen Maria II and her German Consort set themselves up in the old Sintra Palace while yet another vast edifice, Pena, was being raised from its crags. The last King and Queen of Portugal used the Sintra palace occasionally in the summer; thanks to their predecessors they already had several others to choose from within a twenty mile radius, and a good deal of their time must have been taken up moving from one to the other. With the declaration of the Republic in 1911, the State took over them all, and now collects a fair revenue from regimented queues of gawpers at past splendours.
For in fact the Palaçio Nacional in Sintra is rather unexpectedly splendid inside, or at least in those parts of it which are open to view. At once grand and gilded yet somehow relatively intimate and small-scale, neither exactly medieval nor anything else, it’s a shame that it’s no longer possible to wander around it at leisure to admire the workmanship and the painting and dwell on the passions and intrigues and pleasures and disappointments that once gave it life. There’s no other building quite like it in the world, and there’s a lot that reflects the national character in a particularly attractive way. By the standards of the Loire châteaux, for example, it’s perhaps a shade primitive and unsophisticated, even ‘homely’; at the same time, it makes their calculated elegance and fantasy seem almost pompous. Sometimes it’s rather witty and playful: in one room medallions of swans each in a different attitude and all wearing coronets around their necks completely cover the ceiling, and in another the same effect is achieved with gossiping magpies. Elsewhere, there’s something of the visual atmosphere of that characteristic Portuguese emotion, saudades, which I can only attempt to translate feebly by describing it as a nostalgia for something that never existed.
A number of high dignitaries and camp-followers would inevitably have followed the royal court to Sintra, and a town of sorts have developed around it, but what that was like we can’t say because almost all of it has been replaced much later. The single exception is a very substantial mansion close by the Palaçio, the Paço dos Ribafrias or Casa Pombal depending on which earlier or later occupant is being referred to. This house was built around 1534 by one of D Manuel’s officials who had been elevated to high rank and awarded the land for whatever services were rendered, and is still ostensibly in fine original condition. It must have been very well made, because it seems to be the only building that was not affected, or not seriously affected, by the earthquake. The same Gaspar Gonçalves a year or two later built another very fine house, the Quinta da Ribafria, a little distance out of the town in what would have been then, and still is in a way, the countryside. Almost unknown, separated by a kind of moat from a minor road and visible only through an intervening bosquet, this lovely little palace used to offer a tantalizingly-convincing glimpse of rustic sixteenth-century aristocratic existence now only partly diminished since 1987 by its institutional status.
It seems likely that as early as the sixteenth century Sintra was being parcelled out amongst those fortunate enough to grab them into the tracts of forest that became the quintas that help determine it’s special quality. Perhaps the most notable of these early estates is the Quinta de Penha Verde, in a prime position on the slopes of the Serra and a gift from the king to D João de Castro. The gift was extended by Manuel’s heir after D João’s successful combat against a band of Mediterranean pirates, and he went on from there to become in 1548 Vice-Roy of Portuguese India, dying three weeks after his appointment according to the Inventário. There was a story that Penha Verde was given as a compensation to D João for his shaving off his beard for some sacrificial reason or other of national importance, but that seems more in the nature of romance than historical fact; and another romantic story, that the first orange tree imported to Europe was planted in the grounds where it not only became the parent of all others but still thrives, is even less plausible. Certainly, the Quinta is exactly the sort of place to encourage legends of a fanciful nature as one passes it by a narrow lane within high crumbling walls from which gnarled vegetation is sprouting and under an arched bridge surmounted by a cross. That and an elegant classical portal give little indication of the palatial conditions beyond, but it was always a complaint of curious but excluded visitors to Sintra that ‘interesting’ views were impeded by walls and closed gates. In the seventeenth-century a grandson of the original de Castro who was appointed Chief Inquisitor made extensive ‘improvements’ to the property, but by the time I came here it was almost in a ruinous condition and I used to wander around in the adjoining woods collecting chestnuts, without being able to find the mythical orange tree. A little later it was acquired by one of the international financial persons who were appearing at that time. The Portuguese State, as a condition of handing over a national monument, decreed amongst other things that the library be completely restored – a fairly daunting requirement, as this was a large salon lined from floor to ceiling on four sides with renaissance shelving. The condition was accomplished with all due respect thanks to expert advice and the finest materials – except that the new owner was evidently not of a literary mind, and instead of the thousands of leather-bound volumes that the library must once have held, there was only a mournful set of plastic-covered encyclopaedias and half-a-dozen paper-back ‘thrillers’. More depressing, the other rooms had been painted sterile white and filled with a few pieces of fluffed-up furniture that might have come from the Tottenham Court Road in the late ‘fifties. The gardens, flatteringly said to have cost a ‘fortune’, were all tidied up and set with concealed electric lighting to assist the activities of twenty or so security guards, though what they had to protect remained mysterious. Oh well, we can’t have everything; I suppose it’s better that the building more or less remains – is it? - than to be replaced by concrete apartments for inferior nouveaux-riches. There was no more chestnut-gathering, though, the woods are barred where no-one goes to see with barbed wire barricades. These manorial premises in their day harboured and sustained numerous dependants and the owners were not so proud – or should I say they were proud enough not - to decline the fruits of their earth and to share them in common humanity. That’s a very far cry from processed prawns in the first class cabins of airliners and a paranoid dread of fossickers getting ‘something for nothing’.
One other early quinta, mercifully, has fared better, that of dos Pisões, not far from the Palaçio. The house in some ways looks startlingly modern, almost as if it could have been designed by a very inspired and original architect of the nineteen thirties or forties, but a very beautiful stone surround to an unassuming street entrance is engraved in one corner 1533. The decoration of this gateway - exquisitely chiseled men-in-the moon and entwined salamander motifs - is quite unique in Portugal and bears, I would say, all the marks except perhaps its whimsicality of Italian workmanship. Amazingly, it’s almost undamaged and almost as crisp as when it was set there, possibly because barely anyone bothers to notice it. Hundreds of people troop right past it daily, their eyes everywhere else if not looking out for the cars also hurtling past a sharp bend in a lane where they have no business to be. This little detail of loving craftsmanship is a poignant reminder of how ‘progress’ is accomplished at the expense of artistic skill and sensibility; no-one on earth could do anything like it any more. There are no official details available about the history of this house or what later modifications it underwent. Local lore concerns itself only with the belief that is it ‘haunted’, that every so often a shower of stones descends within it. I’ve no idea how the occupants deal with this annoying phenomenon. It’s true that the land descends steeply below into a particularly gloomy and deeply forested ravine, which could perhaps encourage excitable fantasies; doubtless, also, that dark deeds have taken place within the precincts.
The village of Colares, six or so kilometers further on towards the sea, was another centre of rural estates on account of its lovely position on the sunny flanks of the serra, more ‘pastoral’ and less dramatic than Sintra itself. For the very diligent seeker, a renaissance arch and a doorway can be discovered there, neither very remarkable. On the side of the road between, however, in what is presently a rather amateurish ‘gardening centre’, stand the ruins of a more imposing house, the Casa das Lafetás or the Quinta do Cosme. It was built in 1556 by a Milanese merchant married to a Portuguese wife and on what would have been then, one imagines, a fairly isolated site. Descendants of the original Lafetás were under suspicion at a stage of concealing Jewish blood, and were interrogated by the Holy Office, otherwise known as the Inquisition, with what consequences are not recorded. Nor is it clear what happened to their house. I have the impression it’s destruction is comparatively recent and that what remains is little more than an eyesore to the occupants of the new ‘country villas’ that have regrettably sprung up around it in the last ten years.
No comments:
Post a Comment