Sintra, Part 1: Quinta da Regaleira

 This Saturday we visited Sintra, a town where Portuguese royalty, noblemen, and later Gilded Age bourgeoisie built summer palaces to escape Lisbon's heat.  Sintra is in a shady valley in the hills northwest of Lisbon, and from the tops of the hills, you can see the Atlantic spreading out from the coast below.  

Rafi and Zeke with the National Palace of Sintra behind

The town has far too much to see in one day, and it will actually take us about three posts to tell you about what we saw and what pastries we encountered on our daytrip this Saturday.  But the place that really knocked our socks off was the Quinta da Regaleira, a palace built only about 100 years ago when an eccentric Brazilian coffee magnate, António Monteiro Carvalho, commissioned an Italian opera set designer to remodel the existing palace and to landscape the gardens for his private Xanadu.

Krista and the boys, Quinta da Regaleira

We entered through the gardens, but on the way to the palace, we got distracted by an intriguing door leading into a spiral staircase inside the hill.  When we emerged from the staircase, we found ourselves inside the estate's chapel, which was decorated with both Christian and Masonic symbols.

The chapel

Masonic symbols in chapel décor

We also admired the "neo-Manueline" architectural flourishes throughout the garden and palace.  Here are a few of the ornate arches and doorways:

Rafi, clearly impressed.

Zeke enjoying a little corner

The guys at the entrance to the palace itself

The palace had bright mosaic floors in one room, coffered oak ceilings, and intricate designs everywhere.  I especially liked the red velvet-upholstered doors with silver trim. 

Now that's a door!

Monteiro dos Milhões (Monteiro the Millionaire) liked to have trippy stuff around the house.
In fact, we almost tripped off the edge of the floor in the library!

Actually, it's all done with mirrors.  Whew.

Once we had explored this small palace, we walked around the huge gardens sprawling up the hill.  And came to the mouth of a cave...

Ready to explore!

A few feet into the mouth of the cave, we saw lights leading further into the hill...

We followed the lights to the end, and saw sunlight around the corner.  

We had reached a grotto!  We all had fun crossing the lake on stepping stones and looking back at it from a narrow rock bridge. 

Then we returned to the dark caverns and followed more fairy lights to a place where a shaft of light shone down from high over our heads.

We were at the damp, misty bottom of the "Initiation Well," where Monteiro would take his buddies to introduce them to the secrets of freemasonry.  

Looking down the Initiation Well

After emerging from the well's long, winding staircase, there was still more of the garden to see, with baroque belvederes and fountains tucked into every corner.

There was even a tree that seemed to be growing books.  Zeke wondered if we could get one of these to plant in our yard back home.

Another little turret with views of the Moorish Castle up the hill and other wonders of Sintra...

After several hours of walking around the palace and gardens, we were starting to get hungry, but when we saw a sign pointing to the "Grotto of the Labyrinth," we couldn't resist.  We followed a path into a pitch-dark cave (so dark, we have no photos of it!), keeping a hand on the dank wall to make our way forward.  We reached a place where sunlight seeped dimly through the green mossy cavern and reflected on a lake.  We continued around in the dark and reached a second opening in the rocks where we could see the light glimmering on the pool of water in the cave.  Finally, we emerged at the side of a pond with rivulets dripping through ferns.  A magical finish to our afternoon at the Quinta da Regaleira.