I arrived in Sintra after crossing the Atlantic by plane. I am an accidental tourist, one of those who travel extensively for work but almost never for pleasure. When we arrived in Lisbon, shortly after seven in the morning, I still had to find the Santa Rossío station, from where the train that was to take me to my final destination left. I was looking forward to combining two weeks of relaxed sightseeing with a little work.
After an intense year, I harbored a mixture of tiredness and impatience to start my vacation. Finally, the train stopped at a quiet station and I started to be captivated ...
If the tourist guides were completely sincere, they would recognize that Sintra is not a natural miracle, but a human invention ripped out for centuries from valleys so steep that, honestly, they should be called ravines. But the hand of man has covered them with a cloak of trees so dense that the human gaze is deceived. Anyone would swear that the town he was crossing by taxi was an undulating green sea from which loomed, here and there, towers, palaces, villas, quintinhas and churches. Who can resist so much charm? The valley that surrounds the city is a show carved into nature with effort and centuries of dedication, but the result, like any good work of art, seems inevitable and natural.
He did not detract from the charming Lawrence Hotel, an orange building nestled among trees and rose bushes in which he would live for the next two weeks. I chose it, I admit, for the somewhat childish reason that Lord Byron had long stayed there. I don't know what he came to do to this part of the world, but he described Sintra as an earthly paradise, and weeks ago he had asked for the room that the British writer had supposedly occupied.
What was to be my home for a few days consisted of a square living room with a fireplace flanked by open windows overlooking a forest. A worktable placed under the north window would half-open the city. The adjacent bedroom had a romantic air that won me over. I ordered a cup of tea and leaned back in an armchair in front of the fire that the hotel waitress lit to nuance the humidity of the sunset. A cool mist was falling on the roofs. I imagined how nice it would be to walk through that place. Everything was perfect, except, perhaps, the sense of unreality that accompanies me when I travel alone, so I decided to leave as soon as possible to find what had brought me there.
While walking the steep alleys of Sintra I remembered the comment of an American tourist after a visit to a European country: “It is full of castles and turrets, paved streets and postcard landscapes. Avoid it, it is a real tourist trap », he told me. I smiled remembering his face, walking absentmindedly.
Then I turned a corner and suddenly what I was looking for appeared: the Quinta da Regaleira, a challenging building that opens its eyes to the street, ready to be admired.
At first glance, it is disconcerting to suddenly come across an imposing silhouette that seems to overflow the walls that surround it on the cobbled street. At once I fell under his spell. I crossed the threshold of the garden, from which the last tourists left. A dirt road made its way, flanked by ferns and azaleas in the shade of willow trees bent from the weight of their branches. Everything was strangely
silent, the wind barely murmured among the trees. As I entered there, fountains appeared, delicate nymphs, statues of musicians with the body of a goat, naiads, gargoyles ... I looked enraptured. The Fifth contained the alphabet of the alchemists, the dream of a Portuguese mason passionate about magic, embodied in the stone and the exuberant nature of that extraordinary place.
In the following days I was able to continue exploring the roads, secret tunnels and grottos, and a chapel full of Templar symbolism, with echoes of secret societies and mysterious anecdotes. In a hidden place in the garden two deep wells were sinking, which I could walk down its nine underground floors, suggestive and disturbing at the same time. Little by little I returned to the earth and the light from the dark and wet bottoms of the well. At the top of the house was the owner's alchemy laboratory, surrounded by sculptures of mythological animals.
One afternoon I was able to visit the greenhouse of the house with a guide, designed to supply the alchemy laboratory. It was a narrow, elongated building, with strangely rustic and austere light brick walls, compared to the rest of the buildings in the Quinta. The atmosphere inside was humid, a little overwhelming, although the light poured in through the large windows. We toured the rows of native species; Ferns, camellias, roses, small araucarias and some cypresses abounded, as well as young specimens of cedars, magnolias, chestnut, sequoia and yew, all of them in carefully labeled pots. Then came the section dedicated to more unusual plants, planted in well-marked, well-kept flower beds. There were simple aromatic herbs, but part of the greenhouse contained alchemical plants such as Datura, which should not be touched without gloves, even when dry, and which shamans mixed with lard to provoke visions; or the Atropa belladonna, whose name means "inevitable" because it can cut the thread of people's lives; Solanum dulcamara, which has dark fruits that burn as if they were incense and cause hallucinations; or Jacobaea vulgaris, which was used in the Middle Ages as a love potion, and which in certain quantities is very toxic ... All this was a true arsenal with which to do good or also evil, I thought at the end of the visit. "There is an alchemist apprentice in each of us, and there is much to learn here," the guide told me with a smile before leaving.
Surrounded by that alchemical alphabet sculpted in stone and nature, I remembered another special garden, that of an extraordinary western sage who throughout the 20th century knew how to dive into the complexities of the human mind. In the stone house where he spent the last decades of his life, in the town of Bollingen, in Switzerland, Carl Gustav Jung chiselled himself, on a stone square, the message he had heard in one of his dreams shortly before. of dying: «And this will be a sign of integrity and unity for you».
For Jung, this dream meant that he had achieved his life goal. His life, however, was not a journey of roses, but a long struggle full of challenges and years of depression, loneliness and much misunderstanding on the part of those around him. This psychiatrist, the son of a Lutheran pastor, tirelessly searched the minds of his patients, libraries, and daily life for ways to understand our complex psyche. He found some fundamental clues in alchemy, which he interpreted in a psychological way, and his work decisively contributed to spreading this forgotten discipline in the West, at a time when it was only considered an outdated remnant of the past. Without a doubt, it was he who first discovered its beauty.