Quinta da Regaleira and the Initiation Well

A 27-metre well that was never a well, built for initiations

Quinta da Regaleira sits on the wooded slopes above the old centre of Sintra, inside the cultural landscape of palaces, parks and gardens that UNESCO lists for its Romanticism. In 1892 the estate was bought from the Viscountess of Regaleira, of a wealthy merchant family from Porto, by António Augusto Carvalho Monteiro, one of the richest men in Portugal, known as Monteiro the Millionaire. He wanted a place where he could gather the symbols of everything that fascinated him, and with the Italian architect and set designer Luigi Manini he remade the 4-hectare estate between 1904 and 1910, borrowing from Roman, Gothic, Renaissance and Manueline building.

The palace bristles with Gothic pinnacles, gargoyles and an octagonal tower over five floors, with servants' rooms in the basement beside a kitchen that sent food up by lift. In front stands the Chapel of the Holy Trinity, small but several floors deep, with frescoes of Teresa of Ávila and Saint Anthony and a floor showing the armillary sphere of the Portuguese voyages and the Cross of the Order of Christ, ringed by pentagrams. The park is laid out neatly at the bottom and left deliberately wild at the top, in keeping with Monteiro's belief in primitivism.

The real wonder lies underground. Tunnels link a string of grottoes, Waterfall Lake and the chapel crypt, and they open into two shafts that look like towers sunk into the earth. The larger, the Initiation Well, drops 27 m down a monumental spiral staircase of nine flights with 23 niches in its walls, ending at a stone compass rose set with a Templar cross. A smaller Unfinished Well climbs by straight stairs through ring-shaped floors. Neither ever held water.

Monteiro was fascinated by the Knights Templar and quite possibly an initiate in the Templar tradition, and the estate is full of supposed references to them, to Freemasonry, alchemy and the Rosicrucians. The nine flights may stand for the nine founders of the Templars, or for the nine circles of Dante's Hell. The story told is that a blindfolded candidate went down the well holding a sword to the heart, groped through the dark labyrinth at the bottom toward daylight, and crossed stepping stones over the water to the chapel to be welcomed into the brotherhood.

Waldemar d'Orey bought the estate in 1942 as a family home, and in 1987 it passed to the Japanese Aoki Corporation, which kept it closed for ten years. Sintra's town council bought it in 1997, restored it, and opened it to the public in June 1998. Visitors now go down the well themselves.