Portugal Pt. 2 - Sintra

So there's going to be a whole lot of photos in this post; you have been warned.

Sintra is a picturesque town close enough to Lisbon to be a tourist destination for just about everyone looking for a day trip to do while on holidays. Even the Portuguese visit Sintra. Lord Byron even wrote a poem about it. It's that good.

Below you can see the building that is the icon of Sintra: the Sintra National Palace

But that's not what I loved about Sintra. There's a couple of castles up on the hill and stuff, but they're not what I fell in love with either. The Quinta da Regaleira is an absolutely amazing neo-romantic palace and garden full of absurd follies, astonishing architecture, sinister alchemical allusions, a smattering of Templar and Masonic references and just a hint of eccentricity.
This is the main house as seen from the current tourist entrance:
And this is a view from the inside of the Labyrinthine Grotto, one of the many grottoes and follies in the gardens.

And one from the outside so you can appreciate the artificial lake outside the grotto:The Gate of the Guardians. This is a folly which guards the entrance to an underground tunnel with a mysterious destination that I will reveal later on in the post...


A closer picture of The Guardians.
Opposite the Guardians is the Terrace of Celestial Worlds and reservoir. The Terrace has its own homage to the Moorish ruins on the hill that overlooks Sintra (hiding behind a tree in this pic unfortunately):Now, the other end of the underground tunnel that is guarded by the Guardians. The Initiation Well (Dum-dum-dah!!) a 27 metre inverted tower with 9 levels of spiral staircase, a huge 'Templar/Ordo Christo' cross at the bottom and replete with not 1 but in fact 2 underground tunnels (the one from the guardians meets halfway up, the one from the bottom has two exits...) that were once the home to introduced colonies of bats. Unfortunately the pictures don't do it justice. Oh and did I mention that there is a hidden entrance through a revolving stone door in a dolomen?

I honestly could go on and on about all the iconography that is spattered around the estate (I haven't even posted pictures of the chapel!) but I fear it would get tiresome too quickly. Suffice it to say, that I'm a sucker for the eccentric, the esoteric and am prone to the flights of fancy that the builder of this estate must have also been subject to. The imagination and vision simply takes my breath away. No doubt I'll get around to posting more on the Quinta da Regaleira at another point.

N