Quinta da Regaleira, Palace and estate in Sintra, Portugal
The estate extends across four hectares with winding paths through terraced gardens leading to chapels, grottoes, fountains, and artificial lakes, while the five-story palace in Romanesque and Gothic styles features towers, battlements, and ornately carved facades of local limestone.
Between nineteen hundred four and nineteen hundred ten, millionaire António Augusto Carvalho Monteiro worked with Italian architect Luigi Manini to transform an estate from the seventeenth century previously owned by the Baroness da Regaleira into an elaborate complex that hosted cultural events in nineteen seventeen and opened as a museum in nineteen ninety-nine.
The palace combines architectural references to the Templars, Rosicrucians, and Freemasons with Portuguese building traditions, creating a space for philosophical contemplation and esoteric studies that reflects intellectual currents of the early twentieth century.
The estate opens daily at nine thirty and closes at nineteen hundred during summer months and seventeen hundred during winter, with audio guides available at thirty locations, while tickets can be purchased online or at the entrance and comfortable shoes are recommended for the hilly terrain.
The grounds contain two initiation wells connected by underground passages, with the main well featuring a spiral stone staircase ninety feet deep divided into nine landings that symbolically reference Dante's Divine Comedy and the journey through underworld, purgatory, and paradise.
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