I went to a wedding and saw all my cousins in one place for the first time in decades. Sharing some of the same DNA, it turns out, does not mean sharing the same taste.
At the beach, one cousin recommended a Francesinha—a wet open-faced sandwich of melted cheese layered over pork slices on white bread and drowning in tomato sauce. It was rather disgusting, but I ate it anyway because I’d already paid for it. Every time he looked over, I forced a smile while chewing the soggy mess to thank him for the suggestion.
Then, overhearing that we were going to Sintra, another cousin recommended Quinta da Regaleira. “This is the garden to go to,” she said. “All the others are kitsch.”
Naturally, the tickets were sold out.
This was poor planning on my part, and my wife made sure I understood that I had dropped the ball. Our trip to Sintra was going to feel like going to Paris without seeing the Eiffel Tower or Rome without the Colosseum. Worse, Regaleira was the only major Sintra garden completely sold out that Friday, which seemed to confirm that everyone else had already figured out what I had failed to.
But when my back is against the wall, I somehow pull architectural tour rabbits out of the hat. On our last vacation I had pulled sold-out Van Gogh Museum tickets and a Rietveld House tour out of nowhere. I reminded the family: I always find a way.
And so began the first circle of hell.
With the official site tickets sold out, various shady tour sites offered packages whose fine print included guided tours but no admission to the sites. I refreshed the official website to see if anybody relinquished their tickets. Then refreshed it again. Then again. Eventually I was checking it with the spiritual discipline of a medieval monk waiting for a vision.
At 6 a.m. on the morning of our visit, three slots appeared. I thanked the architectural tour gods bought them immediately. I overpaid a little but did not care.
Then there was the second circle of hell - luggage logistics.
Because our rental car SUV had no proper hidden trunk, I had become obsessed with the possibility of someone smashing the windows and running off with our luggage. The night before, I hid everything under a car mat in the trunk to avoid loading the car in front of preying thieves. At 2 a.m. I parked in the municipal lot with the rear of the car facing an Italian restaurant, apparently believing that proximity to pasta eaters constituted a security system.
My family thought I was insane.
“Who is going to steal our stuff up here in the mountains?”
I told everyone to hup hup and finish brushing their teeth. I still needed to pack their toothbrushes. A vacation activity had somehow became a military operation.
Then came the third circle of hell. The drive.
After hiking 10 miles up and down 5 other garden sites in Sintra, we paid a guy to take us from Montserrat to Quinta da Regaleira.
Traffic in Sintra is forced into a single 10 km counter-clockwise loop, because the roads were originally built narrow for horses. If your destination lies only a mile clockwise, a bus still requires a 30-minute detour of nearly 9 km in the opposite direction. Our driver simply cut across the loop, driving short stretches the wrong way to save time and collect exorbitant fares from time-pressed travelers.
There is a particular kind of terror that comes from realizing your risky transportation strategy has become: I assume this guy knows what he’s doing speeding down the road in the wrong direction.
And then, finally, the remaining circles of hell at Quinta Regaleira.
António Augusto Carvalho Monteiro, the Brazilian-born Portuguese millionaire known as Monteiro dos Milhões, bought the estate in 1892. He was a lawyer, butterfly collector, artisanal shampoo bottle designer, Dante obsessive, and enthusiast of Freemasonry, the Knights Templar, Rosicrucianism, and alchemy.
He did not want a country house. He wanted a physical manifestation of everything he had ever been interested in.
For this he hired Luigi Manini, an Italian set designer from La Scala. Manini understood scenery: entrances, reveals, theatrical scale, the psychological value of making someone walk around a corner and discover something they were not expecting.
Between 1904 and 1911, they turned the four-hectare estate into a permanent opera set, completed with the help of Coimbra sculptors. The palace is teeming with pinnacles, gargoyles, carvings and Manueline flourishes. The chapel mixes Catholic imagery with occult symbolism. Paths disappear into grottoes, lakes, tunnels and gardens.
And then comes the Initiation Well. It is a 27-metre inverted tower with nine spiral levels descending into the earth.
You descend with a few hundred other paying visitors, slowly spiraling downward into the darkness in a tourist conga line taking every selfie imaginable, past something that seems to be borrowing equally from Dante’s 9 circles of hell, Masonic initiation rituals, the underworld, and a very expensive Halloween attraction.
At the bottom is Monteiro’s emblem: a compass laid over a Templar cross.
Then you escape through cave tunnels to a few stepping stones beside a waterfall and toward daylight.
The garden is built around this opposition. The upper landscape suggests order and consciousness; the underground suggests the unconscious and the underworld. Paths, plants, carvings, staircases, grottoes and wells have all been recruited into the symbolic machinery.
You do not simply walk through the garden.
The garden walks you through Monteiro’s metaphysical filing cabinet.
And this is where it goes wrong for me.
The ambition is commendable and all. The craft is extraordinary. It is a rich man’s stage set frozen in stone, and Manini’s theatrical background is everywhere: every turn wants a reveal, every wall wants a secret, every tunnel wants to mean something.
Fog and moss do most of the real atmospheric work. Without them, Regaleira risks feeling less like an enchanted landscape than an extraordinarily expensive haunted-house attraction built by a man who had read too much Dante and possessed the financial means to do something about it.
Beautiful. Crowded. Ingenious at extracting tourist dollars. Exhausting.
Gothic revival pushed past conviction into pure contrivance, where every stone whispers a secret until, somewhere around the ninth circle, you just want it to quiet down.
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