At this event we'll get to know the majestic Quinta da Regaleira, as well as a pleasant walk through the Sintra mountains.

Registration closes on 10 October

Quinta da Regaleira:

Quinta da Regaleira is one of the most surprising monuments in the Serra de Sintra. Located at the end of the town's historic centre, it was built between 1904 and 1910, during the last period of the monarchy.

The romantic domains that once belonged to the Viscountess of Regaleira were acquired and extended by Dr António Augusto Carvalho Monteiro (1848-1920) to establish his place of choice. The holder of a prodigious fortune, which earned him the nickname Monteiro dos Milhões (Monteiro of the Millions), he combined his unique architectural and landscape project with the creative genius of the Italian architect and set designer Luigi Manini (1848-1936) as well as the mastery of the sculptors, stonemasons and carvers who had worked with him at the Palace Hotel do Buçaco.

A man of scientific spirit, vast culture and rare sensitivity, a remarkable bibliophile, discerning collector and great philanthropist, he left imprinted in this stone book the vision of a cosmology, a synthesis of humanity's spiritual memory, whose roots are steeped in the Portuguese and Universal Mythical Tradition. The architecture and art of the palace, chapel and other buildings were scenically designed in the context of an Edenic garden, with a predominance of neo-Manueline and Renaissance styles.

The garden, a representation of the microcosm, is revealed by the succession of places imbued with magic and mystery. Paradise is materialised in coexistence with an inferius - a dantesque subterranean world - to which the neophyte would be led by the Ariadne's thread of initiation.

These scenes represent an initiatory journey, like a vera peregrinatio mundi, through a symbolic garden where we can feel the Harmony of the Spheres and scrutinise the alignment of an asceticism of consciousness that travels through the great epics. It contains references to mythology, Olympus, Virgil, Dante, Camões, the Templar mission of the Order of Christ, the great mystics and thaumaturgists, the enigmas of Royal Art and the Magna Obra Alquímica. This stone symphony reveals the poetic and prophetic dimension of a Lusitanian Philosopher's Mansion. Here Heaven and Earth merge into a sensible reality, the same that presided over the theory of Beauty, Architecture and Music, which the acoustic shell of the Terrace of the Celestial Worlds allows to propagate throughout infinity.

Walking:

After the visit to Quinta da Regaleira, we'll go for our usual walk through the Sintra hills, passing by the Palace of Seteais, among many other beautiful places.