It was largely the construction of Pena that set the vogue for that architectural eclecticism and whimsicality that is the hall-mark of Sintra, for actually the greater part of the present-day town derives only from the second half of the 19th century – politically a relatively stable period here as elsewhere without overt revolutions and wars and during which the bourgeoisie flourished - and most people who pass through here never see much else. What makes it charming and not merely grotesque, like Pena, is that although it indulges every eccentricity and fancy, and sometimes makes graceful reference to all sorts of former or even exotic styles when its not inventing completely new ones, with one or two exceptions it doesn’t pretend – or at the worst not so blatantly and badly - to be something else or mix things up so randomly and purposelessly. Pena is not very intelligent but Sintra mostly is, and so it’s like very good company: it’s genuinely inventive with the intention of being surprising and pleasing, and hours, or days, can be spent just wandering around aimlessly taking it all in, there’s something new around every corner and although it’s not a large town, it’s not as small either as it looks and straggles up and down in unexpected places amongst its bosky slopes. Santa Maria is well worth a detour in its own right as a collection of highly individual houses, no two alike and each as if competing to be the most striking while co-mingling perfectly with its neighbours; in São Pedro, a step or two further on and a real ‘working’ village, quintas and villas cohabit equally comfortably with an artisan population. Even the couple of exceptional instances that spring to mind, both actually early twentieth century and of course I’m excluding the more recent catastrophes, are still slightly ambiguous, one can’t be quite sure whether they’re exactly as stupid as they might seem or just carrying a good joke a shade too far. The Paços do Concelho, or Town Hall, looms up first as the traveller approaches, and always draws a gasp of admiration from anyone reared on Walt Disney although it’s only been there since the first years of the twentieth century. The ‘manuelism’ is pretty crude and phony, but the spire adds a nice line to the horizon and it’s a long sight better than the modern box of cement and plate glass (fortunately more out of sight elsewhere) that accommodates the overspill of functionaries as their official duties ramify. (Incidentally, at the same time as the Town Hall, not far from it and on the site of a the former cemetery of St Sebastian, an odd little octagonal ‘castle’ went up which still bemuses some arrivals by train. Either then or later, it served for a while as the town jail, and was apparently a jovial enough place, the convicts loudly and successfully soliciting alms from out of the embrasures.)
The Chalé Biester rises a shade pompously and quite disproportionately from the forest above the town. It upsets the scale, so that everything else, if viewed objectively, seems to be diminished by it, for Biester is a very large house. It might be called a palace, did not propriety forbid, for its reputation was as low as its pinnacles were high. There were people who pretended not to know it was there, even some who had a good deal to conceal themselves, because – exaggerating in the manner of small town gossip – it was regarded as little better than a bordello in best Belle-Époque style; and possibly worse, it had been put there by foreign individuals of unacceptable origin. It quite obviously cost an enormous amount of money in 1904, money it was suspected had been gained in ways which were altogether too blatantly shameless. It was shockingly nouveau-riche even for the period, and so the accusations of immorality were as good as fore-destined even if the owners, as far as one can make out, were fairly mild or timid by nature. Four kings had dined there, it was reported in whispers, but no queens; the monarchs were accompanied by their respective mistresses, and no respectable woman, obviously, after that, could set foot in it. Moreover, with its French-gothic pretensions, hypocritically Christian chapel and extravagantly-painted salons, it was not only an eye-sore but an affront to every standard of rectitude.
Biester was entered by a large carved door opening into a baronial hall with marble columns from which drooped the perfect blooms of many pots of orchids that were wheeled in every night from a special greenhouse used only for their cultivation. On one side of that there opened a vestibule with the walls painted in neo-classical ‘Pompeian’ motives and containing a life-sized marble nymph archly drooping also; and leading to a circular ‘chapel’ garishly but dramatically decorated in primary colours with scarlet-velvet-upholstered prie-dieux. On the other side there was a ‘gothic’ staircase ascending a semi-cylindrical stairwell of faux-marbre. Ahead were the three reception rooms that otherwise comprised all of the first floor. The drawing-room extended the length of a long garden terrace, itself already raised to a height which afforded a splendid view of the sunset and all the way to the sea. The dining room comfortably seated twenty six, and with subdued lighting even then the walls disappeared into the gloom. Both had riotously and in a way beautifully painted ceilings of canvas set into carved ‘gothic’ tracery, but everything was exceeded, I thought, by the music room, in grass green with white and gold plaster tracery and with acoustics which emphasized every rumble of the black Steinway concert piano. It only lacked a gilded harp, but those were more difficult to come by and anyway no-one knew how to play one. All the painting was the work of the highly-accomplished Italian stage designer Luigi Manini, much in demand during his stay in Portugal between the 1880’s and 1913. The splendours declined a little on the first floor, where apart from a ‘boudoir’ in tartan and masculine leather and the ‘master-bedroom’, really outrageously got up with pink-bottomed cherubs floating above the bed, there was a long corridor opening onto goodness knows how many other bedrooms rather less flamboyantly adorned and graded to the importance of guests; those of no importance, like poor Richard, were relegated up to the next level where they tended to get lost, there were so many rooms and cubicles and spaces that were never entered; and above the lot there was a ‘loft’ under the roof that could have accommodated a whole family. To furnish and equip a house like that no more than adequately would have cost at least as much as to buy it, and in this case not much attempt had been made. As I said, it was supported over a lot of other spaces used for domestic purposes, and a very large and immensely enviable kitchen with multiple marble sinks and every traditional practical facility. The workmanship was everywhere of the highest quality, even down to the last details of door locks and shutter hinges. Twenty hectares of gardens contained the usual grove of camellia trees (said to thrive in Sintra like nowhere else) and a miniature swan lake with cascade, as well as flower beds and orchards and vegetable plots and more greenhouses and ‘rustic walks’, and all that was bounded by a couple of miles of stone wall. It couldn’t possibly be maintained properly without about fifty servants, and that’s principally where Robert had bitten off a good deal more than he could chew. It took two fit and energetic elderly women alone endlessly on hands and knees to keep the intricate parquet floors polished and shove the piano about, and an elderly gardener struggled manfully with an assistant only to deal with the orchids and the floral displays – the rest was left to nature. Disasters were always happening: one whole floor gave way to bottomless depths; the upper parts caught on fire because no-one had warned that the single ornate fireplace was not meant to be used; the complicated system of pipes feeding the lake as well as the house blocked up and no-one had the faintest idea how that connected with an underground stream taking the overflow from the roof; no-one could be persuaded for any amount of money onto the roof to look at the slates and the finials; and so on and so forth. It was entertaining to observe these antics from a distance, but it was also a source of deep gratitude for being poor enough never to be tempted into the agonies of trying to represent oneself in possessions, however beautiful..
One of the treats in Biester was to hop ever the wall into the adjoining Quinta da Regaleira, by comparison making the former seem quite chaste and restrained. Regaleira has become an institutionalized museum and an obligatory stop on the busy tourist itinerary and therefore as dull as dishwater, but it wasn’t that before: tended, allegedly, by only a pair of intoxicated housekeepers, the grounds were both voluptuously gorgeous and disturbing. A tower inverted into the ground instead of towards the sky had as its bottom a sacrificial floor – a human sacrifice? In artificially constructed grottos, somewhat in the manner of those of Ludwig of Bavaria after Lohengrin etc, the last remaining of a pair of guardian swans still held sway; this savage and frustrated creature bided its time in the shadows until the unwary intruder stepped onto a causeway of stones in the ‘lake’ and then skimmed, hissing, across the water to attack. The ethereal birds beloved of balletomanes are capable of breaking a man’s leg if they set their minds to it, as Tchaikovsky hinted. Shortly after that a Japanese ‘businessman’ got hold of Regaleira and for a while hordes of his countrymen could be seen prowling around in it, each with a camera stuck permanently to his face. I dare say they made short work of the swan, or if not the local Council certainly did when it twisted the place off the Nips and turned it into another tidy fairy palace for the purposes of extracting loot from the gullible. The Council made short work of the sacrificial stone too, we don’t want that sort of thing upsetting anyone.
The former Quinta da Regaleira, with gardens already elaborately adorned with towers and fountains and ‘shell’ grottos, was acquired in the 1890’s by a ‘Brazilian’ – a designation not necessarily literally correct - still remembered locally as something like “Mr. Money Bags”. It was not intended as a flattering appellation, and indeed when finally his dream palace was more or less complete around about 1918 there were some people who would have preferred not to see it if it were it not even more difficult than Biester to ignore. In fact, it’s quite impossible to ignore, Luigi Manini again saw to that by creating en plein air and on a prime site one of the most sensational theatrical settings ever devised in modern times and with such extravagant flair that grudging criticisms dry up and wither away. I think this borrowed and skillfully manipulated photograph begins to do it justice.
Another genuine nineteenth century ‘folly’, the Quinta do Relógio, faces Regaleira across the road, like a little girl in oriental fancy dress she hasn’t quite the self-confidence to wear looking at a full-blown supremely confident Empress in full regalia; the feeling is that she might have done better to have stayed at home and not made quite such a mistakenly quaint exhibition of herself even though she was there first. This quinta, in spite of having achieved a sentimental fame as the honeymoon resort of D Carlos and Dona Amélia in 1886, really is nothing more than an inelegant pavilion surrounded by exceptionally well stocked and beautiful gardens originally dating from an earlier period and visible for once to anyone over a low parapet.
Something that looks from a kilometre or so away like another Moorish castelo atop another lesser peak turns out on closer inspection to be a complete fake constructed entirely from cement (I’m afraid this is not a candidate as a ‘listed’ building!), with silly watchtowers and battlements, but it’s too far away to cause offence, it’s all of a piece and I dare say, in that position with an eagle-eye’s view over a now-blighted Estramaduran panorama and where there’s never a daylight hour when the sun is not striking at least one side of it, a very pleasant place to inhabit. Politely called the Quinta do Monte Sereno, it’s nothing of the sort, just a large and ugly if comfortable villa built by a maker of the local confection that gives it its popular appellation, the cheesecake fortress; an awful lot of queijadas must have been consumed!
Although it’s possibly true that Sintra contains a higher proportion of once-luxurious and prosperous dwellings than any other town in the world, there’s nothing excessively rarified or artificial about it, and the palaces and mansions jostle happily enough with lesser houses of various degrees of significance, either self-contained or as apartments, and with urban cottages. It has (had, that’s diminishing) the feel of a genuinely ‘democratic’ community and in fact passed through the post-Revolutionary years after 1974 with less disruption than many other Portuguese towns. Many people have lived here all their lives, and that’s always a good recipe for social harmony and mutual understanding. Sintrenses of all classes are very ‘patriotic’ about their beautiful setting, they’ve resisted innovations and developments even when these are encroaching all around and its nomination as a World Heritage Site in 1995 although not necessarily an unmixed blessing, has probably helped to ensure its survival for at least a little longer.
Although it’s possibly true that Sintra contains a higher proportion of once-luxurious and prosperous dwellings than any other town in the world, there’s nothing excessively rarified or artificial about it, and the palaces and mansions jostle happily enough with lesser houses of various degrees of significance, either self-contained or as apartments, and with urban cottages. It has (had, that’s diminishing) the feel of a genuinely ‘democratic’ community and in fact passed through the post-Revolutionary years after 1974 with less disruption than many other Portuguese towns. Many people have lived here all their lives, and that’s always a good recipe for social harmony and mutual understanding. Sintrenses of all classes are very ‘patriotic’ about their beautiful setting, they’ve resisted innovations and developments even when these are encroaching all around and its nomination as a World Heritage Site in 1995 although not necessarily an unmixed blessing, has probably helped to ensure its survival for at least a little longer.
A characteristic feature of a good many nineteenth century buildings is what might appear to be an element reminiscent of a Switzerland or Bavaria, with steep-pitched roofs and projecting eaves supported by fretwork wooden ornamentation, either with deference to the hilly terrain or to the influence of the imported Condessa mentioned in the last chapter. But I think there’s another influence too. The only place that has ever reminded me of Sintra is Goa, in India, the utterly different climate and landscape notwithstanding. There’s a former Portuguese ‘top-brass’ resort called Lanolim inland somewhere from Magdaon and almost forgotten – it took ages to find anyone who’d heard of it let alone take me there on the back of a motor-scooter – but where in spite of the dust and the scrubby jungle the same sort of ‘tone’ was faintly audible. Amazingly for India, there was hardly anyone to be seen, except some listless servants in the gardens of a few elegant houses, recognizably Portuguese with Indian trimmings. Elsewhere, in a stretch of coastal jungle north of Benalim, there was half-buried a whole succession of houses outdoing, for sheer fantasy and variety, anything I’ve ever seen here, and many of them with the same sort of frilly wooden decorations. By no stretch of the imagination could it be supposed that they’d been affected by memories of the Tyrol. Portugal only lost its Indian possessions in 1961, and as Goa anyway had evidently been a pretty rich one up until then and for four hundred years or so before, it’s probably reasonable to conjecture that an untraced – I’ve never heard it mentioned - architectural influence came back along with the spices and the silk. The neglected example in the photograph above, with a vaguely Indian doorway, is distinctly cosmopolitan in any case; sometimes additionally the walls are painted in alternating stripes of ochre and pink, like pajamas worn horizontally.
The town generally tends to be put in the shade, or overpowered, by a few buildings with perhaps slightly dubious credentials to which the random eye – and most eyes are pretty random at first arrival - is incredulously drawn. Not all of these is literally from the nineteenth century, but we might say that each partakes of the opulent and upholstered spirit which ended forever with the First War. The Palaçio das Valenças is the first most striking one, and also by far the most restrained. As appeared to be fashionable at the time, its architect was Italian, and that may account for the ‘foreign’ look. It was finished in 1870 on what, surprisingly, is said to be the site of a slaughterhouse, in which case early nineteenth century Sintra was a good deal less precious than it later became. As with many local buildings it had to be artfully arranged on steeply sloping land, here at almost a 45 degree angle, so that one from side, back or front is unclear, it’s five stories high supported on arches while on the other - street – side it presents a spaciously extended horizontal aspect of two floors; which means that a large part of it is in a sense underground. At a mundane domestic level, that is the source of a variety of common difficulties, interior damp primarily amongst them, but we Sintrenses try to rise above those trivialities. The Valenças seemed to have faded gracefully away allowing the local Council to acquire the house as a Municipal Library and the grounds as a very attractive Municipal Park. Too attractive, perhaps, because largely regardless of the weather, these gardens used to, and still to some extent, provide a setting for the astonishingly bold courting activities, to put it as politely as I can, of Portuguese adolescents – or to be more precise, for the public wiles of barely post-pubertal females. It being social death for a woman to remain single, pursuit starts as early as possible and with a praying-mantis-like determination and rapacity aimed at the first and nearest remotely accessible target. The boys, brought up as decorative dolls by mothers who have already been through the mill, strut around prettily enough but offer little resistance and are the passive partners. Fortunately, the misery and monotony entailed in premature and thoughtless marriages is mitigated by many opportunities for ritualized adultery and other variations on the connubial theme later managed more discreetly.
I mentioned already (Chap VI) the melancholy fate of Beckford’s folly at Monserrate, which lay in romantic ruination for decades. Various ‘foreigners’, amongst them D Fernando himself, had tried unsuccessfully to get hold of it until the owning family returned from India in the middle 1850’s and finally made it over to Francis Cooke, an English Department Store proprietor who had been living, for reasons unknown, in another nearby quinta. An architect called James Knowles was commissioned to allegedly re-model what was left of the existing structure and a landscape gardener (James Burt) to go to work on the grounds, their labours being completed by 1863 and crowned by a Portuguese Viscountship for the former Mr. Cooke. The success of this ambitious scheme – which continued with additions and re-modellings until his death in 1901 - was always somewhat debatable; for a start, a certain aura of the parvenu hung around the new Visconde, in spite of his inheriting a baronetcy as well later on; and his second wife, an American, was described by those who didn’t like her as a ‘missionary’, worrying about the morals of the local population, introducing them to the protestant Bible and generally attempting to put them into respectable skirts. Although the family only used the place for three months or so in the year, if the Visconde saw a new rustic building appearing within his horizons – which were very wide from that viewpoint – he ordered it to be pulled down. Moreover, he apparently managed to somehow acquire all the adjoining quintas and fill them with his friends and relations, as a myriad of forgotten forest tracks still leading in all directions from Monserrate to other secluded neighbouring houses would seem to testify. Altogether, he was inclined to be high-handed and too much the lord of the manor, and so failing other obvious sins accusations of bad taste were inevitable. Although the gardens initiated by Beckford were botanically most impressive, it was observed that they’d been scattered, rather like a magpie’s nest, with incongruous bits and pieces – including an Indian arch – picked up by Cooke in the course of various voyages, and that artificial cascades and manufactured ‘ruins’ were over-doing it completely. As for the ‘house’ itself, described by one later critic as “constructed in a Moorish delirium”, it would seem now, completely empty of any contents, not one thing nor the other, neither palace nor quinta nor really a satisfactory residence of any sort. Pavilion would be the best description. The entire ground floor – which has never been opened to my knowledge and has to be appraised by looking through windows - is nothing more than a continuous long hall divided into widening spaces, and what is above no-one that I’ve heard of has ever seen. Seeing it as it is now it would be difficult to imagine anyone, for instance, having a meal more than a picnic in it – perhaps that was the point of stocking the nearby houses with the friends and relations. As a ‘pleasure-dome’ in the oriental fashion, which was what was probably in the designer’s mind, it’s admittedly very fetching, but then it’s difficult too to imagine the Cookes as devoted pleasure-seekers or sybarites on that scale. However, I’ve found a rather gushy and reverential account of it written by an anonymous American in 1891
http://www.oldandsold.com/articles21/portugal-4.shtml)
which gives a completely different impression, the ground floor richly furnished and piled with works of art and very substantially being lived in. As the author – who has much that is interesting to say about Portugal generally – can’t be faulted on accuracy otherwise, I suppose what he recounts here has to be believed. All I can say is that I don’t think, if I had them, that I’d want to leave the thousands of volumes of books and the tapestries and all the rest which the American mentions in a draughty and exposed building like that during a Sintra winter, but perhaps if one is rich enough those common household details don’t matter. My judgment is that is it was largely a very great deal of money showing off, a smaller version of Pena in other words, although again, as with that, the craftsmanship – square metre after square metre of meticulously chiseled stone - is such as can now hardly be conceived of being done by human hands let alone being drawn out in the first place; and besides Monserrate works as an architectural unity far more successfully, like it or not.
http://www.oldandsold.com/articles21/portugal-4.shtml)
which gives a completely different impression, the ground floor richly furnished and piled with works of art and very substantially being lived in. As the author – who has much that is interesting to say about Portugal generally – can’t be faulted on accuracy otherwise, I suppose what he recounts here has to be believed. All I can say is that I don’t think, if I had them, that I’d want to leave the thousands of volumes of books and the tapestries and all the rest which the American mentions in a draughty and exposed building like that during a Sintra winter, but perhaps if one is rich enough those common household details don’t matter. My judgment is that is it was largely a very great deal of money showing off, a smaller version of Pena in other words, although again, as with that, the craftsmanship – square metre after square metre of meticulously chiseled stone - is such as can now hardly be conceived of being done by human hands let alone being drawn out in the first place; and besides Monserrate works as an architectural unity far more successfully, like it or not.
Sir Frederick Cooke inherited Monserrate after the death of his father, making more improvements and opening it to the public gaze in return for purchase of a ticket; and his son in turn employed Walter Oates to do further landscaping until in 1928 there were rumours that it was up for sale. The Council had to intervene to ensure that a new owner would not close public access, but in fact no buyers were forthcoming for the palace itself even though the adjoining quintas were sold off “for a low price”. The price of Monserrate and its extensive grounds was not, evidently, low at all, and it remained unsold until 1949 when a Portuguese financier bought it and eventually “delivered” it – whatever that means – to the State in 1968. The gardens remained open to anyone who wanted a look for the price of ten escudos or so – very good value for money, since there was hardly anyone else ever there and it was certainly all very delicious and gorgeous in its forgotten magnificence and with some trees and shrubs that someone once told me had become extinct everywhere else in the world – until 1994, when it was closed and major works were obviously about to take place. They took place for the next seven years or so, and now the Cooke folly is displayed again in pristine condition but of course at the cost of a serious diminution in atmosphere. Visitors are directed where to go by helpful signs and unecessary little wooden fences, and they can read, if they wish, descriptions of the trees and plants and decorative adjuncts: few bother, they wander around aimlessly and get back on the pantomime conveyance provided by the Council for the purpose. An occasional more dedicated traveler can be seen slogging on foot along the three kilometers between there and the town. The professional combination of alegria da casa and brincos-de-princesa which surrounds the ‘pavilion’ has set the fashion for the next couple of years for amateur home gardeners throughout the town.
The Chalé Biester rises a shade pompously and quite disproportionately from the forest above the town. It upsets the scale, so that everything else, if viewed objectively, seems to be diminished by it, for Biester is a very large house. It might be called a palace, did not propriety forbid, for its reputation was as low as its pinnacles were high. There were people who pretended not to know it was there, even some who had a good deal to conceal themselves, because – exaggerating in the manner of small town gossip – it was regarded as little better than a bordello in best Belle-Époque style; and possibly worse, it had been put there by foreign individuals of unacceptable origin. It quite obviously cost an enormous amount of money in 1904, money it was suspected had been gained in ways which were altogether too blatantly shameless. It was shockingly nouveau-riche even for the period, and so the accusations of immorality were as good as fore-destined even if the owners, as far as one can make out, were fairly mild or timid by nature. Four kings had dined there, it was reported in whispers, but no queens; the monarchs were accompanied by their respective mistresses, and no respectable woman, obviously, after that, could set foot in it. Moreover, with its French-gothic pretensions, hypocritically Christian chapel and extravagantly-painted salons, it was not only an eye-sore but an affront to every standard of rectitude.
Quite apart from all that, I have to say I always found Biester irresistible, and for a while I was there a lot, when it was owned by an American who’d bought it on a whim and lived to regret it. Even Robert’s millions were scarcely adequate for the colossal and continuous drain it represented on his checkbook. The original owners, who typically only lived there in the summer, had died childless and the story was had left it all to a ‘maid’. Up until the late ‘eighties, it was deserted and there were said to be trees growing through into the main salão. The Americans did a wonderful restoration job, for which they received little praise because, actually, their reputation around the town was not all that high either, and like the original inhabitants they tended to be ignored except as a subject for interesting gossip. When they’d had enough, after only three or four years, it was terribly difficult to sell even at a relatively bargain price. Kings, presidents and others passed through sceptically and turned it down in favour of more commodious and manageable residences until finally a gentleman in the car-rental business took the bait, but possibly he´s lived to regret it too. The source of the aversion was summed up, I think, by another passing American who’d been allowed to stay there for a week or two in the owner’s absence. It was all right during daylight hours, but otherwise he couldn’t bear to be there alone. I scoffed until one evening I was persuaded to go back with him. At midnight, pitch dark, buried in a thick forest, very insecurely protected from any intruder, with fifty-one empty rooms and raised over cavernous semi-underground chambers, I had to agree it was not cheerful. Richard wouldn’t go to bed until we’d checked every room, like over-excited schoolboys looking under each bed and in all the floor-to-ceiling cupboards, and then he locked himself in with a length of rope in order to make a hasty escape out a window if necessary and which aperture he also used to pee out of rather than dare the corridor to the distant bathroom (there were only two in the entire house). Apart from that, there was no heating and it was distinctly chilly. I stumbled out as best I could and ran all the way home, leaving him to it. Normally, if there were enough people in it, it was a different matter altogether.
Biester was entered by a large carved door opening into a baronial hall with marble columns from which drooped the perfect blooms of many pots of orchids that were wheeled in every night from a special greenhouse used only for their cultivation. On one side of that there opened a vestibule with the walls painted in neo-classical ‘Pompeian’ motives and containing a life-sized marble nymph archly drooping also; and leading to a circular ‘chapel’ garishly but dramatically decorated in primary colours with scarlet-velvet-upholstered prie-dieux. On the other side there was a ‘gothic’ staircase ascending a semi-cylindrical stairwell of faux-marbre. Ahead were the three reception rooms that otherwise comprised all of the first floor. The drawing-room extended the length of a long garden terrace, itself already raised to a height which afforded a splendid view of the sunset and all the way to the sea. The dining room comfortably seated twenty six, and with subdued lighting even then the walls disappeared into the gloom. Both had riotously and in a way beautifully painted ceilings of canvas set into carved ‘gothic’ tracery, but everything was exceeded, I thought, by the music room, in grass green with white and gold plaster tracery and with acoustics which emphasized every rumble of the black Steinway concert piano. It only lacked a gilded harp, but those were more difficult to come by and anyway no-one knew how to play one. All the painting was the work of the highly-accomplished Italian stage designer Luigi Manini, much in demand during his stay in Portugal between the 1880’s and 1913. The splendours declined a little on the first floor, where apart from a ‘boudoir’ in tartan and masculine leather and the ‘master-bedroom’, really outrageously got up with pink-bottomed cherubs floating above the bed, there was a long corridor opening onto goodness knows how many other bedrooms rather less flamboyantly adorned and graded to the importance of guests; those of no importance, like poor Richard, were relegated up to the next level where they tended to get lost, there were so many rooms and cubicles and spaces that were never entered; and above the lot there was a ‘loft’ under the roof that could have accommodated a whole family. To furnish and equip a house like that no more than adequately would have cost at least as much as to buy it, and in this case not much attempt had been made. As I said, it was supported over a lot of other spaces used for domestic purposes, and a very large and immensely enviable kitchen with multiple marble sinks and every traditional practical facility. The workmanship was everywhere of the highest quality, even down to the last details of door locks and shutter hinges. Twenty hectares of gardens contained the usual grove of camellia trees (said to thrive in Sintra like nowhere else) and a miniature swan lake with cascade, as well as flower beds and orchards and vegetable plots and more greenhouses and ‘rustic walks’, and all that was bounded by a couple of miles of stone wall. It couldn’t possibly be maintained properly without about fifty servants, and that’s principally where Robert had bitten off a good deal more than he could chew. It took two fit and energetic elderly women alone endlessly on hands and knees to keep the intricate parquet floors polished and shove the piano about, and an elderly gardener struggled manfully with an assistant only to deal with the orchids and the floral displays – the rest was left to nature. Disasters were always happening: one whole floor gave way to bottomless depths; the upper parts caught on fire because no-one had warned that the single ornate fireplace was not meant to be used; the complicated system of pipes feeding the lake as well as the house blocked up and no-one had the faintest idea how that connected with an underground stream taking the overflow from the roof; no-one could be persuaded for any amount of money onto the roof to look at the slates and the finials; and so on and so forth. It was entertaining to observe these antics from a distance, but it was also a source of deep gratitude for being poor enough never to be tempted into the agonies of trying to represent oneself in possessions, however beautiful..
One of the treats in Biester was to hop ever the wall into the adjoining Quinta da Regaleira, by comparison making the former seem quite chaste and restrained. Regaleira has become an institutionalized museum and an obligatory stop on the busy tourist itinerary and therefore as dull as dishwater, but it wasn’t that before: tended, allegedly, by only a pair of intoxicated housekeepers, the grounds were both voluptuously gorgeous and disturbing. A tower inverted into the ground instead of towards the sky had as its bottom a sacrificial floor – a human sacrifice? In artificially constructed grottos, somewhat in the manner of those of Ludwig of Bavaria after Lohengrin etc, the last remaining of a pair of guardian swans still held sway; this savage and frustrated creature bided its time in the shadows until the unwary intruder stepped onto a causeway of stones in the ‘lake’ and then skimmed, hissing, across the water to attack. The ethereal birds beloved of balletomanes are capable of breaking a man’s leg if they set their minds to it, as Tchaikovsky hinted. Shortly after that a Japanese ‘businessman’ got hold of Regaleira and for a while hordes of his countrymen could be seen prowling around in it, each with a camera stuck permanently to his face. I dare say they made short work of the swan, or if not the local Council certainly did when it twisted the place off the Nips and turned it into another tidy fairy palace for the purposes of extracting loot from the gullible. The Council made short work of the sacrificial stone too, we don’t want that sort of thing upsetting anyone.
The former Quinta da Regaleira, with gardens already elaborately adorned with towers and fountains and ‘shell’ grottos, was acquired in the 1890’s by a ‘Brazilian’ – a designation not necessarily literally correct - still remembered locally as something like “Mr. Money Bags”. It was not intended as a flattering appellation, and indeed when finally his dream palace was more or less complete around about 1918 there were some people who would have preferred not to see it if it were it not even more difficult than Biester to ignore. In fact, it’s quite impossible to ignore, Luigi Manini again saw to that by creating en plein air and on a prime site one of the most sensational theatrical settings ever devised in modern times and with such extravagant flair that grudging criticisms dry up and wither away. I think this borrowed and skillfully manipulated photograph begins to do it justice.
Regaleira undoubtedly has all the usual nineteenth century faults of ‘insincerity’ and opulent shallowness, and judged by the same severe principles I applied to Pena if falls far short as well. What’s the difference? Let’s say that effective theatre doesn’t necessarily have to be good literature, that there’s a great gulf between childishness and mature fanciful sophistication, and that if we have to speak in terms of Sintra’s ‘fairy-tale palaces’ Manini was an aerial winged sprite with a magic touch beside von Eschwige’s heavy-handed gnome. The Italian’s is a great success in its genre because the ‘gothic’ nonsense notwithstanding it’s an imitation, really, of nothing except itself and a totally self-assured advertisement of the advantages of a large amount of hard cash used intelligently; if anything, it re-invents manuelismo, from which it ostensibly and very cleverly borrows, by adding – as an Australian friend pointed out – even what looks like a kangaroo amongst the menagerie of beasts and gargoyles clustering on the spires. Above all, perhaps, it’s not just a ‘house’ but a composed theatre piece in which the distant rocks of the castelo are integrated with natural forest and the exuberant lesser follies, temples, towers, chimeras and goddesses of the gardens; it’s like walking into some fabulous painting and strolling around in it, whereas Pena, as I noted, can only satisfactorily be viewed, and then preferably not very clearly, from a distance and as if most decidedly stuck two-dimensionally on a wall. As a comfortable residence Regaleira too leaves quite a lot to be desired, but in this case that’s not the point, it’s there just for its own sake and Sr. Monteiro was perfectly able to go anywhere else if he wanted domesticity. That he sounds a bit of a fool or worse, dabbling in ‘cults’ or even ‘black magic’ as it has to be supposed, can be overlooked under the circumstances; it’s quite enough that he had the sense to find a genius to personify what he might have wished to be and it’s sad that he barely outlived what took such a colossal effort to construct. It stayed with the Monteiros - a heavy responsibility, surely, as a legacy - until 1949 when someone else bought it and by all accounts vandalized some of the interior; as I said, before it become briefly and unworthily a Japanese ‘investment’ it was slipping into decay like so much else. There can hardly be any private individual in the world with both the desire and the means to maintain it, so its present degraded but well-care-for situation is the best that can be done. Descriptive words rather fail me as regards Regaleira, but it’s fully extolled pictorially here for anyone whose curiosity is aroused
http://www.pbase.com/diasdosreis/regaleira
http://www.pbase.com/diasdosreis/regaleira
Another genuine nineteenth century ‘folly’, the Quinta do Relógio, faces Regaleira across the road, like a little girl in oriental fancy dress she hasn’t quite the self-confidence to wear looking at a full-blown supremely confident Empress in full regalia; the feeling is that she might have done better to have stayed at home and not made quite such a mistakenly quaint exhibition of herself even though she was there first. This quinta, in spite of having achieved a sentimental fame as the honeymoon resort of D Carlos and Dona Amélia in 1886, really is nothing more than an inelegant pavilion surrounded by exceptionally well stocked and beautiful gardens originally dating from an earlier period and visible for once to anyone over a low parapet.
Regalheira was the last but one of the great Sintra showpieces, but the other is best mentioned in another context.
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