There are gardens with a lawn, a few trees, and somewhere to sit. Then there’s Quinta da Regaleira, where apparently the brief included towers, tunnels, a chapel, a palace, and a substantial hole in the ground.
It does make a garden shed seem a little unambitious.
Set in Sintra, Portugal, the estate combines dense greenery with stonework that seems determined to draw your attention in several directions at once. A turret appears between the trees. A staircase disappears around a corner. An opening in the rock suggests there might be something underneath.
Usually, there is.
The photographs probably give away where quite a lot of my attention went: the Initiation Well. Looking down from the top, the staircase winds around the inside of the shaft, passing rows of arches as it descends. People leaning over the stone balustrades give some sense of the scale.
Looking back up produces an entirely different photograph. The sky becomes a bright circle overhead, surrounded by layer after layer of dark stone. Naturally, I took several versions of this. One photograph of a remarkable hole was apparently never going to be enough.
Below ground, the surroundings change again. The passages have rough walls, irregular openings, and stone columns that look rather less concerned with symmetry than the arches above. Light catches the edges of the rock, with a blue glow further along one passage.
It’s an elaborate amount of effort to put into somewhere without a view.
Back outside, there are waterfalls, pools, ferns, and narrow paths through the rocks. Some of the greenery feels quite familiar to a New Zealander. The little stone towers rising out of it, less so.
The estate was shaped by its owner, António Augusto de Carvalho Monteiro, working with the Italian architect and theatrical designer Luigi Manini. The theatrical background makes sense when you look at how the buildings appear between the trees and above the grottoes. There is very little here that looks accidental. More about the estate’s history.
And then there’s the palace itself. Carved window surrounds, balconies, pinnacles, and elaborate stone details compete for space across the façade. Even the smaller structures have received a level of attention that suggests nobody was asking whether a simpler option might be cheaper.
The chapel continues the theme: stained glass, carved decoration, patterned flooring, and carefully worked wooden seats, all fitted into a relatively small space.
Beyond the estate, the wider views of Sintra offer another change of scale: coloured buildings and tiled roofs below a wooded hillside, with castle walls following the ridge above.
Taken together, the photographs make a fairly convincing case for leaving room to wander. There’s the famous well, certainly, but also all the smaller things between it and the palace.
For a blog called Gone Off on a Tangent, a garden full of intriguing side paths seems a reasonable place to begin.
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