It takes a true alchemist to combine Masonry, The Knights Templar, four different types of architecture and perhaps a big dollop of arrogance and not come off looking totally crazy.

Wealthy merchant Antonio Augusto Carvalho Monteiro did just that at Quinta da Regaleira near Sintra, and guess what – it’s a world heritage site too!

The gardens feature grottos, fountains, secret tunnels, towers, lakes and possible Masonic rituals. The house has its own alchemy den on the roof where he spent many hours, days and weeks on endless “projects”.  His breathtakingly talented Italian architect – Luigi Manini – designed and laboured over an incredible amount of detail of every inch of Quinta da Regaleira, inside and out, with masterly imagination and astounding prowess in technical drawing. 

But for all his millions and attention to romantic detail, Monteiro and his wife lived only one year together in the finished mansion before her early death, and he followed her only eight years later.

They left behind an intriguing and beguiling home – an enigmatic thing of beauty for us to enjoy and marvel at, perhaps the best alchemy of all that he conjured.

There’s so much gorgeousness in a few square kilometers around Sintra in Portugal  – it’s almost embarrassing, so on Geoff’s birthday we set out to revel in it all –  how Romantic!

The Romanticism movement is actually the key to all the loveliness around the area – starting with Pena Palace, the summer retreat for the royal family during the 18^th and 19^th centuries and is still used for state occasions to this day.

Pena started out more humbly though – as a small chapel on the hill, which became a place of pilgrimage for kings and monks alike for decades. Despite the massive damage done to the surrounding area during the infamous Lisbon earthquake of 1755, the chapel remained intact.

More decades rolled by until the young, idealists prince Ferdinand took it upon himself to transform the chapel, its hillside and the surrounding estates into the summer palace for the royal family.

The romantic styling was left, naturally, in the hands of German mining engineer Wilhelm Ludwig von Eschwege – hard to believe, but true! He was considered to be just an amateur architect. Perhaps his engineering blood is what ensured the attention to detail was so exact…. But that engineer had a poet’s heart for sure to be able to merge neo-gothic with neo-islamic, alongside neo-renaissance and neo-manueline and wrap it all around the remains of the original chapel.

Today, it is a place of pilgrimage for millions of admirers and romantics, who can marvel at the foresight of Ferdinand and the skill of the amateur Wilhelm.