Quinta da Regaleira: The aftermath of obsession
The final part: leaving, but never really leaving
This is part two of three of a very true story that has had me fixated for almost two years. If you missed the first parts, find them here and here.
Quinta da Regaleira is full of minutiae that individually infers meaning, but collectively obscures any: references to the Knights Templar, Masonry, and dark alchemy as well as Greek mythology and western religion lose their significance when dumped into a big iconography-soup. What happened there is less clear still, but we can interpret that the walk through is designed to reflect either a journey either spiritual or initiatic.
Few people know much about Templar and Masonic initiation rites, but it is said that the initiate was required to undertake a symbolic journey in a forest environment, experiencing hardship and disorientation along the way – Quinta da Regaleira fits the bill. But is it solely symbolic, a billionaire showing off? Were the events as dark as the park leads my overactive imagination to believe they were?
I am a sceptic: I only believe in what I see and experience. But here are the things that I saw and experienced that I cannot only attribute to my hyperfocus. All of the photos I took on film in Quinta da Regaleira are blurry or off. Everything we took before, in Sintra, is just right. Everything after came out perfectly. But everything in the grounds is blurred, with a green tinge. We had visited Cemitério dos Prazeres (the Cemetery of Pleasures) a day earlier, where Monteiro is buried. I had taken a photo of his tomb, unknowingly, in part because it’s so striking – a feat of Masonic design. It was nowhere to be found.
There were other, smaller things that made it feel like time and space were collapsing. We entered a cave and tunnel system during daylight, emerging to find that fog had descended over the mountains. I had been burning earlier in the day, but at 5pm I was freezing. We checked our phones to realise they were both on the brink of death despite being 70% when we went in. Both of our battery packs died, too.
We walked back with a chill, the sunwheels around the village now glaringly obvious. We were desperate to leave, but hungry and with zero way of getting home, so we went to a restaurant to talk over what we’d just experienced. We googled and chatted so emphatically that the man on an awkward date next to us said, “I want to be in their conversation”. We booked an Uber back to Lisbon, and as our driver struggled to locate us, we joked that we were stuck there for eternity, in this village that carries such a unique occult history.
In hindsight, f course an eccentric probably-Freemason would choose to build his temple there. But after Monteiro completed work on the estate in 1910, what happened until his death in 1920 is a mystery. The truth is that nobody alive knows: did he run a cult? Was he just an eccentric? Was all of this, the layout, the tunnels, the altars, the drainage holes, deeply symbolic but ultimately meaningless, a man impressing his rich party guests?
“Leaving us already?” our Uber driver asked, adding to the weight between us. But we could never leave, not really; at our Airbnb, I obsessed for seven hours, going as far as translating the one book about it in existence. I had more nightmares, naturally: I was running through the tunnels, escaping an unseen force who would slaughter me on an altar if I was caught. It is half the fun to interpret the gaps in knowledge; to see the drainage holes, the altars, the Occult symbolism, the Masonic implications, the labyrinthine tunnels, for what they imply. Maybe he was just into the aesthetics and the implications without fully partaking in the lifestyle, but I will never know: either way, I will be forever changed by what I saw and experienced.
A year and a half later, in March this year, we returned. Or at least, we tried to: with Lisbon entering lockdown, the estate itself was closed to the public. On an aimless drive around Sintra we found ourselves at the back of it, its familiar moss and black stones tempting us in, its architecture leaking onto the roads. A small tunnel in the rock exited onto the street – I was drawn, urgently, to get out of the car and explore further. The presence of a security guard strongly discouraged it.
Instead, we visited Monteiro’s crypt again, with the fresh understanding that it was designed by the same architect as the estate, his final resting place after being moved from the basement of his chapel. It’s still just as striking, featuring the symbols he revered so highly. We walked around the cemetery some more and took some photos, including one at the back of the crypt itself, its angel wings visible on the right hand side. On the left, a huge white glow takes up nearly half of the image. A quirk of my Kodak disposable? The ghost of Monteiro, keeping watch over two people who had kept close watch over him?
You decide: half the fun is in filling in the blanks yourself, after all.