Quinta da Regaleira

Documentary records for the property before the nineteenth century are scarce. José Leite is named as owner of a large tract on this slope of the Serra de Sintra in 1697. In 1715 Francisco Albertino Guimarães de Castro bought the site at public auction, after which it was known as the Quinta da Torre, or Quinta do Castro; he piped water down from the sierra to feed a fountain already standing on the land.

The name the estate carries today dates from 1830, when it was held by Manuel Bernardo Lopes Fernandes. Ten years later, in 1840, it was bought by Ermelinda Allen, daughter of a Porto merchant, afterwards created 1st Baroness of Regaleira by King Carlos I. A country house went up in her time, recorded in views of the estate made at the end of the nineteenth century. A cast-iron lion modelled in 1837 by the French animal sculptor Pierre Louis Rouillard, the Lion de l'Inde, stood in the Regaleira gardens of that period, and was left deliberately in the same position when the grounds were rebuilt after 1892.

António Augusto de Carvalho Monteiro (1848–1920) bought the property at public auction in 1892, the price recorded as 25 contos de réis and given elsewhere as 25,000 réis. He at once bought neighbouring parcels, which gave the estate its present pentagonal perimeter; the property covers about four hectares.

The French architect Henri Lusseau drew plans for the complex in 1895 and 1896. Carvalho Monteiro wanted a more faithful reinterpretation of the Manueline, and turned instead to Luigi Manini, an Italian scenographer whose career had run through the Teatro alla Scala in Milan and the Teatro Nacional de São Carlos. Between 1898 and 1911 Manini designed, supervised and carried out the works on both the palace and the gardens. Building began in 1904 and most of the scheme was finished by 1910, still under the Portuguese constitutional monarchy.

The stonework and structures were treated with lichens and chemical compounds to counterfeit centuries of weathering, but the technical records place the neo-Manueline building at the opening of the twentieth century. Carvalho Monteiro was a conservative, a monarchist and a gnostic Christian, and he wanted a place where he could live surrounded by symbols answering to his own interests and beliefs. He set out to revive Portugal's most glorious past, hence the dominance of the neo-Manueline and its association with the Discoveries, worked through with Gothic and classical elements and with esoteric themes drawn from alchemy, Freemasonry, the Order of the Templars and the Rosicrucians.

The Chapel of the Holy Trinity was built between 1904 and 1910 to Manini's design, a few metres from the palace's main front, and is tied to the house and to the system of grottoes by an underground crypt. Its front carries St Teresa of Ávila on the left and St Anthony on the right, figures read as honouring Carvalho Monteiro's grandchildren Teresa and António, with the Mystery of the Annunciation above the door. A window inside shows the miracle of Our Lady of Nazaré granted to D. Fuas Roupinho, which students of the estate's iconography take as a reference to a third grandchild, Nazaré. The floor sets the armillary sphere of the Portuguese discoveries and the Cross of the Order of Christ among pentagrams.

The Initiation Well is an underground gallery built around a spiral stair on carved columns, nine landings separated by flights of fifteen steps, the composition alluding to the iconography of Dante's Divine Comedy and the symbolic journey through the nine circles of Hell, Purgatory or Paradise. A compass rose of eight points laid over a Templar cross is set in marble at the bottom. Neither this shaft nor the smaller Imperfect Well to its north ever served as a water source; both were built for ceremonial purposes. Tunnels run from the foot of the well to the Guardians' Portal, the Waterfall Lake and the Imperfect Well, their walls lined with rough limestone brought from the coast at Peniche.

Twenty-three niches cut beneath the steps went unexplained until 29 December 2010, when a team led by Professor Gabriel Fernández Calvo, of the school of civil engineering at the Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha, examined them and found they had not been placed at random: they are grouped vertically in three sets of seventeen, one and five as the shaft descends, a reading of 17-1-5 for the year 1715, when Guimarães de Castro bought the estate at auction. The anthropologist José Manuel Anes, author of the fullest studies of the estate's symbolism, records that no document or official register proves Carvalho Monteiro belonged to any masonic or para-masonic order, while holding that the absence of formal paperwork does not undo the deliberate erudition of the iconography, drawn from templar masonry, alchemy and Rosicrucianism.

The house was worked over five levels. The billiard room, the Sala dos Reis, was given over entirely to the Portuguese monarchy, with a frieze near the ceiling carrying portraits of twenty-four kings and queens of Portugal and the arms of Braga, Lisbon, Porto and Coimbra. The hunting room served the Carvalho Monteiros as their dining room; the Renaissance room, the family's sitting room, celebrates Carvalho Monteiro and his wife Perpétua Augusta. The first floor held the couple's bedroom, the children's room, a study and the Sala Lusíada, named for Luís Vaz de Camões. Carvalho Monteiro's office on the floor above had a framed ceiling painting of the Three Graces and a secondary spiral stair connecting it down to the Sala Lusíada and up to the turret; the octagonal room beside it was shaped to evoke the rotunda of the Convent of Christ at Tomar. The top floor held a laboratory with an east-facing oven and running water, which may have served his work as a naturalist as well. The female servants slept on the same floor as the office, the male servants in the basement beside the kitchen, which had a lift for sending food up to the ground floor.

Carvalho Monteiro died in 1920 and the property passed to his son, Pedro Augusto de Carvalho Monteiro. The intellectual core of the whole scheme had been the owner's private library, and after his death some 30,000 volumes weighing about fifteen tonnes, among them a collection of Luso-Brazilian literature and rare works, were sold to the British bookseller Maggs Bros. and bought between 1927 and 1929 by the Library of Congress. No formal inventory accompanied the sale, so the books were absorbed into the general holdings and catalogued without any note of provenance, dispersing anonymously through the departments. From 2012 the Library of Congress has worked to identify and digitally reunite what it calls the Carvalho Monteiro Collection, tracing volumes by the acquisition numbers stamped on the backs of their title pages, in the hope of mapping the sources behind the estate's iconography.

In 1942 the estate was sold to Waldemar d'Orey, who took it as a private house for his large family and commissioned the architects Luís de Couto and António Lino to remodel the interior for them, suppressing some of the decoration of the previous era. The original carved chestnut staircase in the stair hall was replaced during the D'Orey family's remodelling, and repairs and restoration were ordered across the property.

In 1987 the quinta was bought by the Japanese Aoki Corporation and ceased to be a residence. Aoki kept it closed to the public for ten years. The Câmara Municipal de Sintra bought it in 1997 and began a broad programme of heritage recovery; the estate opened to visitors in June 1998 under the management of the Fundação Cultursintra, and now operates as a museum and cultural centre. The Cultural Landscape of Sintra, which takes the quinta in, was inscribed by UNESCO as a World Heritage Site in 1995. The Portuguese classification as a Property of Public Interest is dated to August 1998 in some accounts and to 2002 in others. Access to the inner levels of the Imperfect Well is frequently closed by the foundation for the conservation of its limestone and the safety of visitors, the shaft being seen instead from the parapet above or from the tunnels that open at its base.