The seventeenth century, elsewhere in Europe one of counter-reformative magnificence in equal proportion to the ravages and miseries of religious wars, saw Portugal in deep decline. Many of the Portuguese are still inclined to hold Spain responsible for that, and to see their years of ‘captivity’ as a national disgrace, to be assuaged by continual contempt for and hatred of their neighbour. One young woman I know fairly well, educated and sensible in all other respects, affects to be unable to bear the sound of Spanish and when she discovered that a doctor she had summoned for a minor complaint was a Spaniard working here she claimed she’d rather die than permit him to touch her and sent him away; her condition was not of course very serious. At Easter time especially, this town is inundated with Spanish tourists. The more brazen of them bluster it out, but the delicate-minded positively cringe while they obsequiously ask for directions in halting Portuguese, a language none of them can manage whereas the Portuguese, if they wish or condescend to, have no trouble at all in speaking Spanish: things have changed a little, apparently, since it was the other way around. One nightmare drawn-out train journey years ago across Spain with a Portuguese was enough – on their territory we were involved in fights most of the way and all of them initiated by my companion I’m sorry to say. I’ve learned to hold my tongue on that subject, to agree politely that Portugal was the only Iberian ‘province’ to wrest the independence from Castile that others are now trying to, and I’m not unaware of the line of battle-scarred fortifications stretching the full length of the frontier and bearing witness to many bloody combats. All the same, it sometimes seems to me the Portuguese make more fuss than is entirely appropriate. Castilian rule was not only perfectly legitimate, Felipe being the son of a Portuguese Princess, but it was not, at least initially, oppressive. Nor is it true, by any linguistic common sense, that the languages are much different, as the Portuguese assert, except for pronunciation. It is true that Portugal was dragged into some murky Spanish affairs to its disadvantage, and also that it was exposed to that variety of Spanish fanaticism represented by the Inquisition and the Society of Jesus, but at the same time it was a Portuguese mistake of some standing that the wealth which made Lisbon the most important city in Europe was not used to develop a balanced social structure or lay the foundations for a strong economy; most of it was either recklessly and wastefully bartered away in Antwerp and such places for manufactured luxuries or spent on extravagantly grand palaces and churches, all under the control of the Crown and its favourites of the moment. That certainly laid them open to intruders. Above all perhaps, the population of the country, especially after it was depleted by the disastrous and senseless Moroccan campaign, was simply not large enough to sustain its imperial ambitions. Holding off pirates and other marauders from the many miles of the Brazilian coastline was alone an almost impossible task, and the wonder is that so few were able to do so much. The former capital of Goa, judging by what remains of it, was an impressive city in which even during the seventeenth century churches were rising bigger and richer than any in Lisbon.
In any case, things deteriorated further after the death of the ‘Spider of the Escorial’. His descendants were not competent rulers and the Spanish Empire too started to crumble for much the same reasons. To prop it up, taxes and military levies were increased while government passed increasingly into the hands of a few unpopular opportunists. In 1637 the Portuguese rebelled and proclaimed the Duque de Bragança as their new king. Three years later, taking advantage of other insurrections against Spain from other directions, the appointed monarch’s supporters went into action: they entered the palace in Lisbon, arrested the Spanish governor along with the Duchess of Mantua, a cousin of the king of Spain, and within five days the first of the Braganças was crowned as João IV. Signing an alliance with Louis XIII of France and making peace with Holland and England, by the time of his death in 1656, D. João had consolidated and restored the Portuguese monarchy, recovered some lost colonial possessions, and defeated Spanish attempts to reincorporate Portugal into an Iberian Union.
I can find just one architectural example from this period in Sintra, and that is the Quinta do Carmo concealed very beautifully in the heights above Colares and when I first came across it accessible only by what was little more than a walking track. There had been a Carmelite Convento there since 1450 or thereabouts, itself ‘moved’ from another earlier site to this one, at that stage judging from its name, Boca da Mata, fairly wild and sequestered. Throughout the sixteenth century it seems to have enjoyed aristocratic patronage and beautification, the forest being cleared, terraces arranged and new trees and orchards planted. In 1614 another pair of donors had erected the present chapel and provided for the interment of the bones of a bishop – a useful means of insuring for the after-life as well as absolving the conscience, in much the same way as tax-evaders make a point of donating part of their ill-gotten gains to fashionable charities – and during the next few years the convent itself was almost completely rebuilt. Unlike other similar monastic edifices, which continued to develop throughout the succeeding century, this one appears to have stayed much as it was until 1834, when it was acquired as the private residence it still is, rather in the way that Henry VIII’s dissolution of the monasteries in England three centuries before passed over valuable church lands and buildings to an equally land-hungry socially-rising laity. Who occupied this place before that, and how? Relatively grand, it is unlikely that it was very comfortable, though certainly a good deal more so than what few rustic dwellings might have surrounded it. The monks to some extent would have lived off their impoverished neighbours as well as their rich benefactors, but that wouldn’t have saved them from, for example, having to cut down trees and saw them up in order not just to stay warm – not such an important consideration in one of the mildest climates in Europe – but to cook over open fires something to eat. Anyone who has done that will know how much muscular energy and time it takes. They had also to grow a lot of what they ate, another time-consuming and frustrating activity. What with the obligatory prayers, they must have been sufficiently exhausted not to worry much about their plight, such as it was when they were escaping a severer one. A mere two kilometres or so further up, their confreres in the so-called Cork Convent (see earlier chapter) were chastising the flesh a good deal more arduously. Would there have been any socializing between them? I suppose not. Each establishment rigorously guarded its own solitude, upheld its own version of religious crankiness, and human nature being timeless and snobbery an enduring element; the extreme asceticism of the other place, as I’ve suggested, might have labeled its aficionados as simple-minded vulgar enthusiasts. But this is all conjecture. In the meantime, political events of which these isolated and self-contained monks would have been barely if at all cognizant were taking place.
Quoting from the basic internet History of Portugal, “Sebastião José de Carvalho e Melo, later the Marquês de Pombal, was a petty noble who managed to surmount Portugal's rigid class system by a combination of energy, intelligence, good looks and a shrewd marriage to become the veritable dictator of Portugal. Once Portugal's ambassador to Britain and Austria, Pombal had been influenced by the ideas of the Enlightenment. Realizing how backward Portugal was, he sought through a ruthless despotism to reform it and create a middle class”. That statement should be just about enough to explain the sentiments, depending as usual which side one happens to be on. He was unpopular with those who didn’t wish to be changed, not with those who wished to rise on his back. The Marguês came to power after 1750 under the heir of João V, predictably given a father like that a second-rate and “indolent” – to quote the same source – youth. Fortune favoured Pombal and he didn’t have long to wait: the earthquake struck five years later. The destruction and terror in Lisbon, because nothing like it had happened in memorable history before, immediately affected all of Europe. Even Voltaire, safely far away, hitherto the daring and mocking atheist, had a serious fright. Could God be giving a warning after all? Perhaps if the French didn’t reform their dissolute ways, the earth might up-heave next time under Paris itself, the divine experiment having so successfully being tried out first where it didn’t matter so much. The Marquês, right in the thick of it and where it mattered a lot, showed more commendable sang-froid. Improvising hospitals, requisitioning and managing food supplies and so on, he went on with plans to rebuild the entire inner city in the severely classical manner we still see in the Baixa, the first model townscape. For this impressive work he was made Chief Minister, in which capacity he commenced a wide programme of reform intended generally to break the stranglehold exercised by the nobility, and not declining such draconian measures as expelling the Jesuits, arresting and executing his opponents, imposing tariff barriers and attempting to amend the education system. He was cursorily dismissed and banished in 1775 with the accession of Maria I, a woman by all accounts not entirely in her right mind who immediately undid all the changes and on the eve of the French Revolution restored Portugal to what it pretty much always had been, thus ensuring that further troubles were inevitable.
Whatever the mistakes or otherwise, the Pombaline period saw Sintra evolving further towards its dream of an earthy paradise. More beautiful quintas scattered the wooded slopes between town and coast, a couple of which the Marquês inhabited himself, or at least he gave his name to them. Evidently whatever his objections to an aristocracy, he was not unwilling to join or emulate it. Perhaps I ought to say something here about this word quinta. Its usual translation is manor-house, which is accurate enough, except that it has no feudal associations. The Portuguese dictionary defines it as a major country house usually enclosed by walls. Something like ‘decorative farm’ is perhaps more to the point: the houses were always luxurious, not ostentatiously so, but they were intended to be largely self-sufficient with gardens and orchards and live-stock prettily arranged around. There is a suggestion about them of something like Marie-Antoinette’s Petit Hameau, but there was a good deal less of dressing up in pink ribbons á la bergère or any of that nonsense and a good deal more of practical utility. Indeed, these characteristic Sintra quintas manage to reach a sort of perfection of their own, combining a simple and tasteful architectural charm with all due attention to the natural world in both its visual and productive aspects. I’ve always lived next to one or another of these much grander establishments. In Stª Maria my modest cottage was poised right over one that in some ways was not a very good example because the owners only visited it for a day or two in a year and the original eighteenth-century house was showing even then serious signs of decay; but the grounds were very well maintained by a resident family who had barely ever to leave them in order to live very well. There were few sounds up there except the clucking of poultry, the bleating of sheep and the occasional ghastly shrieks of a slaughtered pig whose fate was to end up as a string of home-made smoked sausages. The sheep were more fortunate, their milk went into cheese. All the animals, along with a horse or two, wandered about over several acres of terraced orange and lemon groves and vineyards ornamented with blossoming trees; elsewhere there were formal gardens set amongst parterres, as well as vegetable plots. Down in this part of the town there is a collection of newer quintas a little further down the hill. The trouble is that hardly anyone can or wants to live in them these days, so they’re either half in ruins and deserted or turned into institutions of one sort or another, another form of ruination as far as atmosphere goes. The nearest, Villa Eugénia, manages unfortunately to combine both forms of destruction, being set up as a fairly tacky mass-banqueting facility while essential repairs go un-regarded and the further gardens run wild. But as the erstwhile owner is a good friend, and still lives in a certain amount of faded splendour in the former olive-press, I have the opportunity there to hear many recollections of old Sintra – when two coaches were equipped with bed-linen and chamber-pots for the lengthy drive to visit Paris modistes, for instance – and to wander around amongst the overgrown palm-trees and jungly scented shrubs that a battalion of gardeners once tended. In odd corners, covered with creepers, there are remains of accommodation for rabbits and chickens. Other provisions came by road from other houses in other parts of the country. Traditionally, these Sintra houses were only lived in during the summer, when Lisbon becomes oppressive, but in the meantime they flourished, or anyway continued, under the care of armies of servants. It’s the lack of these, as much as anything else, that has seen the end of most of them. The ordinary population of the town and its environs was once almost totally employed in this way, and it seems to me by and large a very pleasant way to live for those without envious ambitions: I’d have loved to have been a gardener or something myself, in a paradise like this, doing useful work and being looked after by people who appreciated it.
To see Sintra at its most gorgeous, it’s enough to proceed by the lower road through Galamares to Colares and then back along the higher one. It’s a fair day’s march. In a car of course it can be accomplished in an hour or two, but to be sealed in a machine viewing the scenery like television is not only to miss much of the pleasure but also almost all of the details. There are a lot of nice things to see, and I’m not remotely attempting here to draw up a list of the dozens of quintas in the Sintra region, but about midway the Quinta da Capela exemplifies the style perfectly; it’s necessary to peer over a wall. Actually, this place is a complete post-earthquake construction of 1773 over the ruins of an earlier quinta belonging originally to the Duque de Cadaval, another of whose houses, more formally eighteenth-century, adjoins it. These days it has been adapted not as a hotel exactly but as a sort of individually-run de-luxe bed and breakfast establishment or ‘inn’, with unusual skill and good judgment. The little chapel of Our Lady of Pity or Piety (Portuguese makes no distinction between those rather different words), a survival of the earthquake and a former resting place for pilgrims on their way, presumably, to less accessible shrines dotted about the region, and from which the quinta takes its name, is inserted into the walls - or the walls have been inserted around it - by the side of the road and is still occasionally in use, albeit I dare say more for self-gratifying purposes than for piedade.
Powdered wigs, one imagines, for the short period they had still to last, would have been even more de rigueur in the Quinta de São Sebastião, nestling in a ravine under the Palaçio Nacional, for this is a grand house constructed in the 1780’s in the neo-classical style and - unlike the others already mentioned which are more a series of somewhat rambling additions over time - evidently as a planned unit relying on its proportions for effect. The gothic-arched windows are ‘romantic’ precursors of the next century, gone are the old-fashioned ‘Pombaline’ multi-paned rectangles which characterised Portuguese architectural detail before The salons have painted decorations of a faux-naif ‘rustic’ elegance. Gone too, according to the ‘rational’ ethos of the period, is the chapel; this one is quite separate from the main building and although it looks authentic enough in fact was not added until 1900. This quinta, with traditional visual good sense, is suspended over a defile running with a few human interruptions from the heights of the serra to join the slightly broader varzea which collects all the water to join the sea six or so miles away. Below there used to be a series of water-mills to grind the local flour. Without much sun it’s rather dank down there, and the mills being obsolete it became an area that was a shade squalid and disreputable, though no longer; the inhabitants of the rustic slums have acquired cars and credit cards and so are now as good as anyone else, and as useless. The last mill is on its last legs.
Seteais bridges the gap between the era before, with its clear light and inner conviction even with the horrors, and the next one, with equal horrors accompanied by decreasing certainty. Human history hardly ever attains anything remotely like a state of grace. It might have for a while in Ancient Greece, and it might have for a while culminating, for some people, at around about 1750, and at odd moments every so often again for some people, but the French Revolution marked an irretrievable division which could never be re-captured, or anyway not in the same guise. Before considering the consequences of that, I want to go back to another Sintra palace simply because of mere literary gossip and tittle-tattle it makes a link with Seteais and illuminates something of the flavour of the era as no ordinary history book ever does.
Short of the royal ones, the Palace of Ramalhão is the largest in Sintra, standing right on the outskirts as an indication on the Lisbon road that the enchanted region has been reached. Until 1658 a ‘hospital’ existed on the site – whatever that quite was, but another charitable religious institution - and then the land was sold to a secular proprietor, who in turn sold it again, and so on, but nothing much appeared to have happened until 1712 when the then-owner started - and continued for the next thirty years or more - erecting residential premises and laying out gardens on a grandiose scale; permission was even granted from the king for the palace to have its own aqueduct, a diminutive version of the Lisbon one. The earthquake necessitated some repairs, but under what might be interpreted as financial difficulties it all passed to yet another owner in 1771. Just a little too severe, even with the extensive garden façade which is today mostly wasted, it’s nonetheless an interesting example of a style of its period about to descend into disorder.
Beckford returned later to Portugal and got up to more mischief elsewhere, which leads us to the next chapter ….
In any case, things deteriorated further after the death of the ‘Spider of the Escorial’. His descendants were not competent rulers and the Spanish Empire too started to crumble for much the same reasons. To prop it up, taxes and military levies were increased while government passed increasingly into the hands of a few unpopular opportunists. In 1637 the Portuguese rebelled and proclaimed the Duque de Bragança as their new king. Three years later, taking advantage of other insurrections against Spain from other directions, the appointed monarch’s supporters went into action: they entered the palace in Lisbon, arrested the Spanish governor along with the Duchess of Mantua, a cousin of the king of Spain, and within five days the first of the Braganças was crowned as João IV. Signing an alliance with Louis XIII of France and making peace with Holland and England, by the time of his death in 1656, D. João had consolidated and restored the Portuguese monarchy, recovered some lost colonial possessions, and defeated Spanish attempts to reincorporate Portugal into an Iberian Union.
I can find just one architectural example from this period in Sintra, and that is the Quinta do Carmo concealed very beautifully in the heights above Colares and when I first came across it accessible only by what was little more than a walking track. There had been a Carmelite Convento there since 1450 or thereabouts, itself ‘moved’ from another earlier site to this one, at that stage judging from its name, Boca da Mata, fairly wild and sequestered. Throughout the sixteenth century it seems to have enjoyed aristocratic patronage and beautification, the forest being cleared, terraces arranged and new trees and orchards planted. In 1614 another pair of donors had erected the present chapel and provided for the interment of the bones of a bishop – a useful means of insuring for the after-life as well as absolving the conscience, in much the same way as tax-evaders make a point of donating part of their ill-gotten gains to fashionable charities – and during the next few years the convent itself was almost completely rebuilt. Unlike other similar monastic edifices, which continued to develop throughout the succeeding century, this one appears to have stayed much as it was until 1834, when it was acquired as the private residence it still is, rather in the way that Henry VIII’s dissolution of the monasteries in England three centuries before passed over valuable church lands and buildings to an equally land-hungry socially-rising laity. Who occupied this place before that, and how? Relatively grand, it is unlikely that it was very comfortable, though certainly a good deal more so than what few rustic dwellings might have surrounded it. The monks to some extent would have lived off their impoverished neighbours as well as their rich benefactors, but that wouldn’t have saved them from, for example, having to cut down trees and saw them up in order not just to stay warm – not such an important consideration in one of the mildest climates in Europe – but to cook over open fires something to eat. Anyone who has done that will know how much muscular energy and time it takes. They had also to grow a lot of what they ate, another time-consuming and frustrating activity. What with the obligatory prayers, they must have been sufficiently exhausted not to worry much about their plight, such as it was when they were escaping a severer one. A mere two kilometres or so further up, their confreres in the so-called Cork Convent (see earlier chapter) were chastising the flesh a good deal more arduously. Would there have been any socializing between them? I suppose not. Each establishment rigorously guarded its own solitude, upheld its own version of religious crankiness, and human nature being timeless and snobbery an enduring element; the extreme asceticism of the other place, as I’ve suggested, might have labeled its aficionados as simple-minded vulgar enthusiasts. But this is all conjecture. In the meantime, political events of which these isolated and self-contained monks would have been barely if at all cognizant were taking place.
After it’s final re-assertion of independence and during the latter part of the seventeenth century the economic administration of Portugal passed largely into the hands of the Head of the Treasury, Luis de Menenses, Conde de Ericeira, sometimes known as the Portuguese Colbert. It has always been the Portuguese tendency to look for inspiration to France, completely by-passing Spain and so overlooking one or two qualities which, as it turns out, might have been valuable. Like his French model, Menenses was a capable if ruthless statesman. He passed sumptuary laws limiting imported foreign luxuries and sought to encourage and protect national textile and manufacturing industries, but soon the improved fortunes of the country were both retarded and spuriously vastly enhanced by the discovery of great quantities of Brazilian gold and diamonds. When the seventeen-year-old João V become king in 1706 his grandiose notions of absolute monarchy, in the manner of Louis XIV of France, suffered from no lack of funds. The Palace of Mafra, a colossal white elephant visible twenty kilometres away from Sintra, during the period of its construction from 1717 to the 1730’s was said to have withdrawn from ordinary use every horse drawn-cart in Lisbon to haul the stones, some of them from Italy as well as the gold that had been hacked from the earth and carried by slaves over hundreds of miles from the interior of Brazil to be put into the weekly fleets of caravels that eventually arrived, laden to the gunwales, in the Tagus estuary.. More usefully, D. João endowed the University of Coimbra with a magnificent golden library, and more usefully still caused to be erected - a marvel of engineering of its time, or any time - the aqueduct that brought fresh water to Lisbon from a source up in the hills. He also encouraged the decorative arts and the native manufacture of generally luxurious goods, so being accredited with presiding over a second ‘golden age’, but in fact these were mostly much the same policies of wasteful extravagance in the hands of a minority that had helped to undo the first one. I’m slipping, as I say this, into the dogmas of latter-day popularist historians and socio-economic theorists speaking after events and without much imagination about them.. It was a literary amusement during the second half of the eighteenth century to toy with ideas of social equality and the rights of man and so on, without any intention of implementing them and of which the subsequent reality was the cause of a sad disillusionment. It’s debatable whether the ‘wastefulness’ of Mafra or even of Versailles – of which the former is an imitation only in size - was any more reprehensible than that of infinitely more ugly things that have gone up since in the name of power-seeking under a different guise, just as its debatable whether ‘democracy’ without the sense of beauty has added anything more to the sum of human contentment or ‘justice’. Be that as it may, things might have been even worse, or better depending on one’s point of view, had it not been for the intervention of a remarkable man whose name still arouses sentiments of admiration and detestation in about equal proportions.
Quoting from the basic internet History of Portugal, “Sebastião José de Carvalho e Melo, later the Marquês de Pombal, was a petty noble who managed to surmount Portugal's rigid class system by a combination of energy, intelligence, good looks and a shrewd marriage to become the veritable dictator of Portugal. Once Portugal's ambassador to Britain and Austria, Pombal had been influenced by the ideas of the Enlightenment. Realizing how backward Portugal was, he sought through a ruthless despotism to reform it and create a middle class”. That statement should be just about enough to explain the sentiments, depending as usual which side one happens to be on. He was unpopular with those who didn’t wish to be changed, not with those who wished to rise on his back. The Marguês came to power after 1750 under the heir of João V, predictably given a father like that a second-rate and “indolent” – to quote the same source – youth. Fortune favoured Pombal and he didn’t have long to wait: the earthquake struck five years later. The destruction and terror in Lisbon, because nothing like it had happened in memorable history before, immediately affected all of Europe. Even Voltaire, safely far away, hitherto the daring and mocking atheist, had a serious fright. Could God be giving a warning after all? Perhaps if the French didn’t reform their dissolute ways, the earth might up-heave next time under Paris itself, the divine experiment having so successfully being tried out first where it didn’t matter so much. The Marquês, right in the thick of it and where it mattered a lot, showed more commendable sang-froid. Improvising hospitals, requisitioning and managing food supplies and so on, he went on with plans to rebuild the entire inner city in the severely classical manner we still see in the Baixa, the first model townscape. For this impressive work he was made Chief Minister, in which capacity he commenced a wide programme of reform intended generally to break the stranglehold exercised by the nobility, and not declining such draconian measures as expelling the Jesuits, arresting and executing his opponents, imposing tariff barriers and attempting to amend the education system. He was cursorily dismissed and banished in 1775 with the accession of Maria I, a woman by all accounts not entirely in her right mind who immediately undid all the changes and on the eve of the French Revolution restored Portugal to what it pretty much always had been, thus ensuring that further troubles were inevitable.
Whatever the mistakes or otherwise, the Pombaline period saw Sintra evolving further towards its dream of an earthy paradise. More beautiful quintas scattered the wooded slopes between town and coast, a couple of which the Marquês inhabited himself, or at least he gave his name to them. Evidently whatever his objections to an aristocracy, he was not unwilling to join or emulate it. Perhaps I ought to say something here about this word quinta. Its usual translation is manor-house, which is accurate enough, except that it has no feudal associations. The Portuguese dictionary defines it as a major country house usually enclosed by walls. Something like ‘decorative farm’ is perhaps more to the point: the houses were always luxurious, not ostentatiously so, but they were intended to be largely self-sufficient with gardens and orchards and live-stock prettily arranged around. There is a suggestion about them of something like Marie-Antoinette’s Petit Hameau, but there was a good deal less of dressing up in pink ribbons á la bergère or any of that nonsense and a good deal more of practical utility. Indeed, these characteristic Sintra quintas manage to reach a sort of perfection of their own, combining a simple and tasteful architectural charm with all due attention to the natural world in both its visual and productive aspects. I’ve always lived next to one or another of these much grander establishments. In Stª Maria my modest cottage was poised right over one that in some ways was not a very good example because the owners only visited it for a day or two in a year and the original eighteenth-century house was showing even then serious signs of decay; but the grounds were very well maintained by a resident family who had barely ever to leave them in order to live very well. There were few sounds up there except the clucking of poultry, the bleating of sheep and the occasional ghastly shrieks of a slaughtered pig whose fate was to end up as a string of home-made smoked sausages. The sheep were more fortunate, their milk went into cheese. All the animals, along with a horse or two, wandered about over several acres of terraced orange and lemon groves and vineyards ornamented with blossoming trees; elsewhere there were formal gardens set amongst parterres, as well as vegetable plots. Down in this part of the town there is a collection of newer quintas a little further down the hill. The trouble is that hardly anyone can or wants to live in them these days, so they’re either half in ruins and deserted or turned into institutions of one sort or another, another form of ruination as far as atmosphere goes. The nearest, Villa Eugénia, manages unfortunately to combine both forms of destruction, being set up as a fairly tacky mass-banqueting facility while essential repairs go un-regarded and the further gardens run wild. But as the erstwhile owner is a good friend, and still lives in a certain amount of faded splendour in the former olive-press, I have the opportunity there to hear many recollections of old Sintra – when two coaches were equipped with bed-linen and chamber-pots for the lengthy drive to visit Paris modistes, for instance – and to wander around amongst the overgrown palm-trees and jungly scented shrubs that a battalion of gardeners once tended. In odd corners, covered with creepers, there are remains of accommodation for rabbits and chickens. Other provisions came by road from other houses in other parts of the country. Traditionally, these Sintra houses were only lived in during the summer, when Lisbon becomes oppressive, but in the meantime they flourished, or anyway continued, under the care of armies of servants. It’s the lack of these, as much as anything else, that has seen the end of most of them. The ordinary population of the town and its environs was once almost totally employed in this way, and it seems to me by and large a very pleasant way to live for those without envious ambitions: I’d have loved to have been a gardener or something myself, in a paradise like this, doing useful work and being looked after by people who appreciated it.
To see Sintra at its most gorgeous, it’s enough to proceed by the lower road through Galamares to Colares and then back along the higher one. It’s a fair day’s march. In a car of course it can be accomplished in an hour or two, but to be sealed in a machine viewing the scenery like television is not only to miss much of the pleasure but also almost all of the details. There are a lot of nice things to see, and I’m not remotely attempting here to draw up a list of the dozens of quintas in the Sintra region, but about midway the Quinta da Capela exemplifies the style perfectly; it’s necessary to peer over a wall. Actually, this place is a complete post-earthquake construction of 1773 over the ruins of an earlier quinta belonging originally to the Duque de Cadaval, another of whose houses, more formally eighteenth-century, adjoins it. These days it has been adapted not as a hotel exactly but as a sort of individually-run de-luxe bed and breakfast establishment or ‘inn’, with unusual skill and good judgment. The little chapel of Our Lady of Pity or Piety (Portuguese makes no distinction between those rather different words), a survival of the earthquake and a former resting place for pilgrims on their way, presumably, to less accessible shrines dotted about the region, and from which the quinta takes its name, is inserted into the walls - or the walls have been inserted around it - by the side of the road and is still occasionally in use, albeit I dare say more for self-gratifying purposes than for piedade.
More out in the open, down below the vila, the Quinta da Madre do Deus, started in the early years of the eighteenth century and added to and improved before and after the earthquake sounds a slightly more ceremonious note while remaining entirely rural in character. The capela was built first, harking back to an earlier period, but that might not have been just in the interests of conventional gestures to piety: the towers or domes or whatever served an important aesthetic function, enlivening and focusing what would have been otherwise little more than a huddle of barns or dormitories. Later on the obligatory chapel turned into not much more than a vestigial organ tacked on the side of an increasingly ornate conglomeration of pinnacles and gables, its purpose to delineate the skyline in a pleasing way had been superseded The Quinta da Madre do Deus is a shade more nouveau-riche of the period, more powdered wigs and carriages perhaps in contrast to the other where carefully unloosed hair and caparisoned mules might have been more appropriate in a deliberately-landscaped country setting.
Powdered wigs, one imagines, for the short period they had still to last, would have been even more de rigueur in the Quinta de São Sebastião, nestling in a ravine under the Palaçio Nacional, for this is a grand house constructed in the 1780’s in the neo-classical style and - unlike the others already mentioned which are more a series of somewhat rambling additions over time - evidently as a planned unit relying on its proportions for effect. The gothic-arched windows are ‘romantic’ precursors of the next century, gone are the old-fashioned ‘Pombaline’ multi-paned rectangles which characterised Portuguese architectural detail before The salons have painted decorations of a faux-naif ‘rustic’ elegance. Gone too, according to the ‘rational’ ethos of the period, is the chapel; this one is quite separate from the main building and although it looks authentic enough in fact was not added until 1900. This quinta, with traditional visual good sense, is suspended over a defile running with a few human interruptions from the heights of the serra to join the slightly broader varzea which collects all the water to join the sea six or so miles away. Below there used to be a series of water-mills to grind the local flour. Without much sun it’s rather dank down there, and the mills being obsolete it became an area that was a shade squalid and disreputable, though no longer; the inhabitants of the rustic slums have acquired cars and credit cards and so are now as good as anyone else, and as useless. The last mill is on its last legs.
Of the same period, but on a positively princely scale and laying claims, perhaps, to being the most beautiful building in Sintra and certainly the most theatrically-effective one, the Palaçio de Seteais engaged the same interior decorator, a Frenchman named Jean Pillement (1728-1808). Whether he was summoned for the purpose or just turned up at the right time to find this pleasant employment is not known; he was a great traveller over southern Europe, a minor painter but very fashionable as a decorator, possibly by the time he was in Portugal already becoming a little passé elsewhere. Seteais means seven sighs and various fanciful - and needless to say totally discrepant - stories exist to explain the appellation. Before Daniel Gildemeester, the Dutch Consul to Lisbon, laid eyes on it in 1762 the former ‘Field of Seteais’ was already occupied by some ruins or other, which Gildemeester’s architect made use of to raise a number of new buildings including part of the present palaçio and adjoining Quinta da Alegria; his patron must have been a very rich man. The palace – then just the main wing of the existing structure - was inaugurated in 1787, its owner having six years left to enjoy it. His widow then sold it to the fifth Marquês de Marialva, a gentleman with other notable residences in Lisbon. The ‘Field’, the large area now planted with lawns and gardens in front of the palace, and extending more horticulturally over the other side of the road that runs past it, had not been included as part of the original leasehold, so that in 1800 when the Marquis started beautifying it there was a ‘revolt’, or protest, from the townspeople against it being closed to public access. He was allowed to continue as a leaseholder, on condition of maintaining two ‘open gates’ for public right of way, and preserving the trees and plants. In 1801 a symmetrical wing was put up, for purely aesthetic reasons surely, because the addition, which looks very substantial from a distance, is only the space of a room in depth, and the real purpose was to accommodate the triumphal arch that appeared the year after for a visit from the Prince Regent and his difficult Spanish spouse. That, as it turned out, was just about the apogée of its glory, because during the next decades it passed hands several times, each time less carefully, until it was more or less abandoned. In the 1930’s the space in front was being used as a race-course and fair-ground. The State acquired it in 1950, and opened it as an hotel in 1955, which is what it still is.
The public right-of-way still prevails, apparently. Anyone at all can wander around the manicured lawns, go through the arch to look at the view of distant Pena framed within it (was that accidental or ingeniously planned, seeing that the present edifice was not there when the arch was constructed?), and even march into the public rooms. All that is prohibited to non-payers is the series of gardens with the swimming pool and so on, but those pleasantries can be viewed from the terrace bar, for the price of a cocktail or a cup of tea by the hour, as there’s never any urgency in Seteais. In the winter, such as it is, the price includes outdoor heating, and although it’s not exactly small it’s unusually good value for money. There’s never anyone else there except perhaps one or two persons absorbed in a book, and the atmosphere amidst banks of semi-tropical flowers is idyllic. As hotels go it’s one of the world’s few remaining great ones, where what you see is real and not a plastic imitation. In odd corners, if one bothers to look, it’s more than a little shabby, which only goes to heighten the splendour of the gilt; at the back it looks distinctly untended, as it would always have done. The parterres have been smartened up lately, for the benefit of wedding party photographers or official receptions, and the front is re-painted from time to time in pink and ochre and fades immediately to more congenial hues. As a relic of the race-course, there used to be stables by the side, where some locals used to keep their horses in conditions as luxurious as the paying guests, but they’ve all gone, probably because of the unavailability of stable-men who now want to be bank-clerks or lucrative dog-trainers.
Seteais bridges the gap between the era before, with its clear light and inner conviction even with the horrors, and the next one, with equal horrors accompanied by decreasing certainty. Human history hardly ever attains anything remotely like a state of grace. It might have for a while in Ancient Greece, and it might have for a while culminating, for some people, at around about 1750, and at odd moments every so often again for some people, but the French Revolution marked an irretrievable division which could never be re-captured, or anyway not in the same guise. Before considering the consequences of that, I want to go back to another Sintra palace simply because of mere literary gossip and tittle-tattle it makes a link with Seteais and illuminates something of the flavour of the era as no ordinary history book ever does.
Short of the royal ones, the Palace of Ramalhão is the largest in Sintra, standing right on the outskirts as an indication on the Lisbon road that the enchanted region has been reached. Until 1658 a ‘hospital’ existed on the site – whatever that quite was, but another charitable religious institution - and then the land was sold to a secular proprietor, who in turn sold it again, and so on, but nothing much appeared to have happened until 1712 when the then-owner started - and continued for the next thirty years or more - erecting residential premises and laying out gardens on a grandiose scale; permission was even granted from the king for the palace to have its own aqueduct, a diminutive version of the Lisbon one. The earthquake necessitated some repairs, but under what might be interpreted as financial difficulties it all passed to yet another owner in 1771. Just a little too severe, even with the extensive garden façade which is today mostly wasted, it’s nonetheless an interesting example of a style of its period about to descend into disorder.
The palace was ‘lent’ in 1787 to William Beckford by a Senhor Street-Arriaga Brum de Silveira, an owner not mentioned in the Inventário. What a single visiting Englishman of twenty–seven should want with all that is very questionable until his character is examined. Thanks to inherited slaves and sugar from the West Indies, this young man even then was a multi-millionaire, and his money he never hesitated to use, a great reason for chagrin and spitefulness in others who had to exercise economies. He’d arrived in Lisbon en route to his Caribbean properties suffering from sea-sickness and ennui and decided to go no further. I’ll use Rose Macaulay (They Went to Portugal) to sum him up: “an unamiable character, said his contemporaries; jealous, malin, an actor but no gentleman ... all that and more; he was ruthless, unscrupulous, malevolent, vain, a liar, a corruptor of youth; he spent his entire fortune almost entirely on himself” But also, his half-admirer adds, “he wrote with genius: he must have had immense charm; he was brilliant, fascinating, cultivated, mood-ridden, witty, perverse; he evoked love, wearied of it, slipped from its fetters and began again elsewhere; he did not like the human race, yet had to secure its appreciation; when that failed, life was ashes to him, he was angry, bitter, contemptuous, yet for ever bent on twisting through any side door into favour”. He was also, following strictly biographical details as far as they go, a crashing snob initially staying in Portugal only for the purpose of gaining an audience with the Queen Maria I, to anyone else’s eyes a dim-witted reactionary, while being thwarted in this intention by the British Ambassador who was appalled by him and what news he had picked up of his scandalous precedents. Lacking all Christian sentiment, Beckford nonetheless attended every Catholic High Mass, and consorted with grotesque Latin ecclesiastics, for their operatic attractions. This difficult fellow, as contemptuous as they were of him of the British colony in Lisbon, a collection of gossiping old maids of both sexes, money-grubbers, adventurers and invalids forever complaining as is their wont of the dirtiness and superstitiousness of the natives for failing to be arranged in the same pecking orders as they’re accustomed to ‘at home’, came to Sintra to be ‘revived’. He was. In the pages of his journals, without any concern for history, politics, or even to some extent accuracy, he turned it into a sort of oriental circus with himself as the organising Caliph. The Inventário says he furnished only three rooms in Ramalhão, but that’s not allowing for his attendants. At that stage he had only thirty or so, including chefs, pasty cooks, barbers, valets, a doctor and musicians, not to say the ‘Portuguese Orange’ as Gregório Franchi was disparagingly referred to later when he was a loyal friend to an ungrateful patron, taken unwillingly back to Fonthill and dying in the cold to be buried anonymously in Marylebone. Beckford, remaining in some ways an adolescent himself, was always something of what would be now absurdly called a paedophile, but this boy, a talented harpsichordist, was pushed by his mother in the right direction without any qualms on the part of any of the participants: “these Portuguese, “ Beckford observed, “are made of more inflammable material than ordinary mortals”, and he should have known because the son of the Marquês of Marialva, aged fifteen, was also making eyes at him, or vice versa, while the indulgent father was simultaneously trying to attach himself to the English millions via an unprepossessing daughter. The only thing to do was to make it all into a carnival farce, to which Beckford’s prose style was perfectly suited. The Marialva household at Seteais was in a state of permanent restless confusion in the midst of retinues of dwarves, Negroes and monks who “skipped about their master where he went”; in the evenings after sumptuous banquets passing musicians scratched and tinkled away execrably while the old Marquis danced a sprightly minuet “unsuitable to his years” . There were aimless excursions for sight-seeing or jolly funerals, which must have been worth observing, with all the entertainers, cooks, footmen and so on trailing along behind; when exhausted by these pleasures, Beckford stayed in his ‘pavilion’, trifling away “the whole morning surrounded by fidalgos in flowered bed-gowns and musicians in violet-coloured accoutrements, with broad straw hats …. looking as sunburnt, vacant and listless as the inhabitants of Ormus or Bengal…” He was only there from July to October, but it’s hardly surprising that the present pious occupants of Ramalhão have taken such pains to exorcise his spirit. “An agreeable variety prevails in my Asiatic saloon”, he noted: “half its curtains admit no light and display the richest folds; the other half are transparent and cast mild glow on mats and sofas. Large clear mirrors multiply this profusion of drapery …” . And so on. No decorative detail escaped his attention. After his departure the palace saw more vicissitudes. In the 1820’s it served as a sort of elegant prison for the tiresome and troublesome Queen Carlota Joaquina who was responsible for the rather badly-painted forest scenes which still adorn one room; and another troublesome Spanish royal exile, Don Carlos, stayed there in 1833. By the middle of the century it stood empty until rescued, though certainly not re-beautified, by the pedagogical nuns. Appearances can be deceptive, though: I was once asked to lunch at Ramalhão, which was as bleak as could be, but afterwards we had an audience with the chief nun in her private apartments, a very civilised and agreeable woman who passed around the port decanter and if my memory serves me puffed away on a cigarette or two, or was it a cigar?
Beckford returned later to Portugal and got up to more mischief elsewhere, which leads us to the next chapter ….
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