Dobleve

Do you ever wonder what burners did before burning man? I’m sure they were inventors, visionaries, hedonists – and knowing that there must have always been burners, where are all their “projects”?? Last weekend we came across a garden outside of Lisbon that is a must see for anyone who has ever wandered through a castle (or even an office building!) pushing on walls and pulling on gargoyles hoping to discover secret passages, or, turned a delivery van into a “capture vehicle” lined with fur (say), or motorized a lazy boy just because it can be done…. It’s the Quinta da Regaleira in Sintra, Portugal. This garden, created in 1910, is clearly the work of a dreamer, a visionary, someone who had they been born 90 or 100 years later just might have been sitting out dust storms with us on the playa.

You enter the QdR grounds under an elaborate stone gateway that juts out on either side with walls that you can walk along but which you can’t exactly tell where they end and how you might get on them. Because, as you soon discover, within the walls of this garden there is no one clear pathway to anything and two people can set out for the same destination and in the same direction and end up in completely different places.

There are underground grottoes throughout. As you enter any one of them your eyes take a while to adjust to the dark. You think you might hear voices but you can’t be sure and just as quickly it’s almost unearthly quiet. Once you have walked underground you lose sense of direction entirely but curiosity is the mother of all accidents and even though you can’t see where you are placing your feet or even where the grotto walls are, you are compelled to keep going just to see where it leads and what else you might find.

What you’ll find, among other things, is a 30m deep well with a staircase that wraps around it in a nine-tiered spiral. The lights and shadows the sun casts over the stair steps and down through the well only add to the dreamlike quality of the whole place. When you reach the top of the stairs it seems there is no exit and you must descend the steps to get out again. But here, push on the “walls” until one swings out and you find yourself in an altogether different part of the garden.

Around every corner there is a new sight. There’s a waterfall with stepping stones leading behind it that come out again behind the water and again in a different part of the garden. There are gorgeous plants and flowers; statues of nymphs, Knights Templar symbols and the odd rib-skinny dog; staircases that descend so far we turned back before reaching the bottom; and finally an elaborate chapel and a tennis court with spectator bleachers on the grounds. This was all built by Antonio Carvalho Monteiro as part of his private estate and dreamt up together with Italian opera-set designer Luigi Manini to be “a synthesis of the spiritual memory of mankind- deeply rooted in the universal and Portuguese Mythical Traditions”. I wouldn’t mind a garden like that when I grow up…