ON THE ERICEIRA road the traveller finally turned back, after reaching the northernmost point on the bend of the River Cheleiros, and headed south. The roads here are rather erratic: they spring up with the firm intention of serving all the tiniest villages in the region, but they never take the shortest route: they meander up and down hills, completely losing their head when they spot the Serra of Sintra in the distance. This wouldn’t be a problem if the sierra had been the traveller’s immediate goal: it is so obviously in front of him that any of them would do. But before that there is a hamlet called Janas, famed for the chapel of San Mamede which has a rare circular layout, and so the traveller made the necessary detour. He did not regret it.
From a distance, the hermitage looks more like a country dwelling than a place of worship. It has a long verandah where it is pleasant to linger a while, and behind the entrance (in this case, it is hardly appropriate to speak of a façade) the walls are supported by sturdy buttresses. The door is locked, but inquisitive travellers can take advantage of any of the windows, even if they are covered with a grille and wire netting. Inside, in the centre of the circle, four columns make a kind of sanctuary where an oil lamp is burning. The altar is up against a wall, which must make the celebration of Mass quite difficult. In the empty space are rows of benches, which look clearly out of place in this circular design. What does look right is the continuous stone bench around the walls of the church. It is true that it is interrupted on either side of the high altar, but its disposition suggests a ritual very different from the normal one. Seated on this bench, the faithful look towards the central area defined by the columns, not at the altar. The traveller cannot understand how this can be reconciled with the usual rite which has the celebrant and his congregation face to face for their gestures and responses. This is either a small mystery, or none at all. Be that as it may, the traveller is almost convinced that in earlier times, the chapel of San Mamede must have been used for other cults and rites. It would not be the only church that had once been a mosque. Or some cult to the sun or moon could have been celebrated here, as a circular space is often the symbol of divinity. This hypothesis may be wrong, but at least it is based on something concrete and objective.
All roads lead to Sintra. The traveller has already chosen his. He will go round by Azenhas do Mar and Praia das Maçãs, and take a look first at the houses cascading down from the clifftop, then the sandy beach lashed by the ocean waves; but he must admit he did all this without much enthusiasm, as if he could sense the sierra behind him, asking over his shoulder: “What’s keeping you?” The same question must have been heard in that other paradise when the Creator was messing about with the clay before he created Adam.
On this side of the sierra, he first comes to Monserrate. But which Monserrate? The oriental palace, inspired by the moguls, now in a state of ruin, or the park that sweeps down from the road into the valley? The fragility of stucco, or the exuberance of vegetation? The traveller takes the first path he comes to, goes down the uneven steps that penetrate the foliage, the deep-green avenues, and finds himself in the kingdom of silence. It is true that there are birds singing, and every now and then some creature crawls through the undergrowth, a leaf falls or a bee goes buzzing by, but these are the sounds of silence. Tall trees rise on both sides of the valley, the tree ferns have thick trunks, and at the very bottom of the valley where streams flow, there are plants with huge, spiky leaves under which a fully grown man could stand to protect himself from the sun. Waterlilies abound on small lakes, and every so often a dull thud startles the traveller: it’s a dry pine cone falling from a branch to the forest floor.
Up above stands the palace. From afar, it still has a certain grandeur. The round turrets with their characteristic lintels catch the eye, and the moulding of the arches is softened by distance. Close to, it saddens the traveller: this English folly, paid for by the cloth trade, and Victorian in its inspiration, shows how fleeting all revivals are. The palace is being restored, which is all to the good: Portugal has more than enough ruins. But even when it is fully restored, and open to the public, it will still be what it has always been: a monument to an age that had every taste imaginable, but never really defined any of them. These nineteenth-century architectures are usually imported, and are eclectic to the point of eccentricity. As empires dominated the world economically, they amused themselves with alien cultures. And this was always also the first sign of their decadence.
From the palace verandah, the traveller looks down at the mass of vegetation below. He already knew the land was fertile: he is more than familiar with wheatfields and pine forests, with orchards and olive groves, but it is only here that he realises that this fertility can reveal itself with such serene force, like a pregnant womb nourishing itself on what it is creating. Just by placing his hand on this trunk, or dipping it into a water-tank, or touching a fallen moss-covered statue, or closing his eyes and listening to the subterranean murmuring of roots. And the sun completes all of this. A small push from the trees would lift the entire earth all towards it. The traveller can feel the vertigo of the great cosmic winds. To make sure he will not be cast out of this paradise, he retraces his steps, counts the tree ferns and discovers a new one, and departs thinking that perhaps the earth will not come to an end so soon after all.
The narrow, winding road clings to the sierra as if embracing it. Deep green vaults protect it from the sun, and carefully shield the traveller fom the surrounding countryside. Who needs a distant horizon when the one close up is a scintillating screen of trunks and foliage, a ceaseless interplay of greens and the light? The Palace of Seteais looks almost out of place, with its enormous elevated terrace that in the end is little more than a belvedere looking out over the plain and offering a scenic view of the Palácio da Pena, perched in the distance.
To try to explain the Palácio da Pena is something the traveller would rather avoid. It’s enough just to look at it, to withstand the shock of this mishmash of styles, to go within ten paces from the Gothic to the Manueline, from the Moorish to the neoclassical, much of it with little sense to it. What is undeniable is that from a distance the palace has the appearance of a rare architectural unity, which probably owes more to its perfect integration into the landscape than to the relationship between any of its various components. Taken bit by bit, the Pena palace shows the aberrations of the imagination when it does not take into account aesthetic affinities or contradictions. Its main tower is clearly at odds with the cylindrical tower at the other end, which in turn clashes with the tiny octagonal turrets that flank the Porta do Tritão. Unity and grandeur are only to be found in the strong arches which support the upper terraces and galleries. Here the traveller is reminded of Gaudí, although it might be more exact to say that the same exotic sources inspired the great Catalan architect and the German military engineer Von Eschwege, who came to Pena at the command of another German, Don Fernando of Saxe-Coburg Gotha, to embody the romantic fantasies so beloved of that race.
It is nonetheless true to say that without the Palácio da Pena the Serra of Sintra would not be the same. To remove it from the landscape, to erase it as if from a photograph of these heights would be to drastically alter what already seems natural. The palace is like an outcrop of the rocky mass that supports it, and this is without doubt the highest compliment that could be paid to a building whose individual components, as someone once wrote, are characterised by “fantasy, insensibility, bad taste and improvisation”. But where this fantasy, insensibility, lack of taste and improvisation go altogether beyond the pale is inside the palace.
This statement calls for a clear explanation. It cannot be denied that in the audience chamber, in the apartments of Queen Amélia, in the state room of Saxe for example, there are many precious items of furniture and objects of considerable worth and artistic merit. Taken one by one and isolated from all that surrounds them, they warrant close attention. But unlike the palace’s structural elements, which achieve harmony in an unexpected unity of conflicting details, inside the palace these decorative ornaments fail to achieve even the simple harmony that comes from an affinity of taste. And when certain antiques were brought here, they were first of all neutralised, then subverted by the general atmosphere: Dona Amélia’s apartments are a case in point. If the traveller were up to making a joke about it, he would say it looks like a suburban villa stuffed inside a palace. To put it plainly: the romantic excess of the exterior did not deserve the bourgeois excess of the interior. To the artificial sentry walk and the pointless lookout towers at every corner, the arrow loopholes reminiscent of bygone wars, was added the theatrical scenery of a court whose idea of culture was essentially ornamental. When the last Portuguese kings came here to rest from the burdens of government, they entered a theatre: there is little difference between this and a painted backdrop. If he had to choose, the traveller would prefer Von Eschwege’s organised chaos to the nouveau-riche splendours of the royal personages.
From these palaces he could see the Castelo dos Mouros, and the traveller felt that was enough. Castles should be seen from outside, and this one, tiny in the distance, was meant to be seen this way, that is symbolically.
The traveller resumes his journey, and finds himself taking so many turnings because of the wealth of vegetation, and taking in so many impressions, that the journey seems much longer than it really is. Long and happy: one of the rare occasions when those two words can be put together.
As for putting words together, remember how Philip II did so when he boasted that the sun never set on the lands he governed, and then went on to say that his kingdoms contained the richest and poorest convents in the world: the Escorial and the Capuchin one at Sintra? But Philip II had everything: the greatest wealth and the worst poverty, which naturally enough meant he could choose. Kings have the strange privilege of being praise-worthy either way: when they enjoy the wealth that goes with their station, or when they are poor, like all those they never bothered to help. What they sought for the peace of their souls was to be able to go and drop in on poverty whenever they wanted to, by coming to visit the friars. The traveller has no idea whether Philip II ever climbed the Serra of Sintra to visit the Franciscans in the poorest of convents in order to balance the periods he spent in the richest convent of his empire. But before him Dom Sebastian often came to talk with the friars, who must all have been delighted at His Majesty’s visits. These were the rings – the caretaker tells the traveller – to which Dom Sebastian tied his horse, and it was at these tables that he sat to take refreshment and rest after the steep climb. It is astonishing how a simple caretaker knows these wonderful facts, and can speak of them as if he had seen them with his own eyes, describing them with such conviction that the traveller looks at the rings and the tables, and almost expects to hear a horse neigh and the king speak.
Those were still peaceful times. There was as yet no reason to fear Castile; Philip II was happy enough with his Escorial and had no desire to take possession of this poorest of convents built of stone, whose only comfort and protection against the biting cold of the sierra was a lining of cork, some of which can still be seen today. It must have been a sign of true humility to choose to live and die here. These tiny doors, obliging even a child to bend down to pass through, demanded the radical submission of body and soul, and the cells they gave on to must have caused their limbs to shrink. How many men could have put themselves through this, or rather, come in search of this self-denial? In the chapterhouse there is only room for half a dozen people, the refectory is like a toy one, with a stone table taking up nearly all the room, and the constant mortification of benches made from wood with rough bark still on it. The traveller thinks for a moment what it must mean to be a friar. To him, so much a man of this world, there is something mysterious and intriguing about someone who leaves his home and work, goes to knock on the convent door, asks: “Let me in,” and from then on is oblivious to everything; even when the king was no longer Dom Sebastian but another one, it was all the same to the Capuchin friars. Considering their place in heaven secure, they even said that the angels don’t speak Portuguese or Spanish, but tried to improve their Latin, as everyone knew that was the celestial language. The traveller mutters this to himself, but deep down he is impressed: every act of sacrifice, renunciation or self-denial moves him deeply. Even being as egotistic as they were, the Capuchins of the convent of Santa Cruz paid a high price. This heretical thought will probably mean the traveller is thrown out of paradise. He could take other roads, or try to hide in the vegetation, but then night would fall and he is not brave enough to confront darkness among these crags of the sierra. So instead he descends to the town, which means leaving paradise for the world, leaving behind too the shadows of the friars, whose only sin was the pride of thinking themselves saved.
The Palácio Nacional in Vila is almost as heterogeneous in style as the Palácio da Pena. But it is more like a vast shoreline where the tides of time have bit by bit deposited their flotsam, slowly accumulating, slowly putting one thing in place of another, and so leaving more than a simple souvenir of each one: the Gothic palace of King Dom Dinis, then the additions built by Dom João I, and later Dom Afonso V, Dom João II, and finally Dom Manuel I, who ordered the construction of the east wing. In the Palácio da Vila you can sense the passage of time. It’s not the petrified time of the Palácio da Pena, or the lost time of Monserrate, or the great question mark of the Capuchins. When the traveller remembers that the painter Jan van Eyck visited this palace, he thinks to himself that some things in this world do make sense.
For his taste, some of the rooms should be more sparse, as close as possible to their original state. It is just as well the ceilings are spared the clutter from which the floors cannot protect themselves. This allows the traveller to view the panelled ceiling in the Sala dos Brasões almost as they might have done in the reign of Dom Manuel, even if his intepretation is different, and to verify that the royal coat of arms is shown here as a sun, around which the coats of arms of the royal princes revolve like satellites, and in an outer ring, those of the noble families of the day. Also the ceiling in the Sala dos Cisnes, by Maceira, and in the das Pegas, where the painted magpies all bear the legend “por bem” in their beaks, even when they are saying what is better kept quiet. But it would be churlish not to praise these wonderful tiles, the ones in the Sala da Galé and all the others, made by secret methods probably long since forgotten. And this greatly disturbs the traveller: nothing invented or discovered by man should be lost, everything ought to be passed on. If the traveller does not know how to reproduce this azul-de-fez colour, he is poorer than all the Capuchin friars put together.
There can be few things more beautiful and restful than the interior courtyards of the Palácio da Vila, few things more serenely inspiring than its Gothic chapel. When the Christian spirit encountered that of the Arabs, a new art form struggled to emerge. They clipped its wings so it could not fly. Among the birds of paradise, this must be one of the most beautiful. But it cannot fly, it cannot live.