Palácio de Monserrate
The Palácio de Monserrate is a villa in the Portuguese town of Sintra . The building is a monument under the number 22672 in the Portuguese monument list SIPA and belongs to the since 1995 as a World Heritage of UNESCO guided cultural landscape of Sintra.
Historical overview
- A chapel in honor of Our Lady of Monserrate was built on the hill of the later palace complex. At that time, the property was owned by the so-called Royal Hospital of All Saints' Day (Real Hospital de todos os Santos).
- In the 16th century, the Mello e Castro family leased the land.
- In 1718 Caetano de Mello e Castro bought the land. He was the 36th Viceroy of India (iAd Portuguese crown) and bearer of the Order of Christ.
- On November 1, 1755, the Lisbon earthquake destroyed all buildings.
- In 1789 Gerard de Visme leased the land and built a small palace in neo-Gothic style on the ruins of the chapel destroyed by the earthquake.
- 1793–1794 came as the new tenant William Beckford . This took over the maintenance and other work on the palace and began with the creation of a garden.
- 1856–1863: Francis Cook came first as a new tenant, then in 1863 he bought the land with all the buildings, and began with the expansion and further construction of the existing palace complex. He rearranged the landscaped gardens. The facility served Francis Cook as a summer residence.
- In 1949, 143 hectares of land with all the buildings and facilities on them were bought by the Portuguese state.
- In 1995 UNESCO declared the landscape around the municipality of Sintra, where the Monserrate Palace is located, a World Heritage Site.
- In 2000 the state-owned company Parques de Sintra / Monte da Lua was founded, whose owners are composed as follows: 35% of the Portuguese state, represented by the tax authority; 35% forest / forest authority; 15% Tourism Association Portugal and 15% the municipality of Sintra. When it was founded in 2000, the forest, forest and green areas of the area that belongs to the Palacio de Monserrate were also taken over.
- In 2007, the management of the palace complex was transferred to the state-owned company - along with many other historical buildings / facilities in and around the municipality of Sintra.
The beginnings
Monserrate, previously known as Quinta da Bela Vista, received its name with high probability around 1540. It can be historically proven that a monk named Gaspar Preto, born in Segura, belonging to the district town of Idanha-a-Nova in the Castelo Branco district , on the Land elevation on which the palace was later built , had a chapel built after his visit to the Sanctuary of the Lady of Monserrate in Barcelona .
How and how the chapel came into the possession and administration of the Hospital Real de Todos os Santos (Hospital Omnium Sanctorum or Hospital of All Saints) in the 16th century is unclear. Documents in the current state archive in Torre do Tombo only prove a lifelong right of use against the annual payment of a fixed amount in favor of the hospital to the nobleman D. Caetano de Melo e Castro, who acquired land in 1718 without any further liabilities. Caetano de Melo e Castro, then State Councilor, Governor of Mozambique , Governor of Pernambuco (Brazil) and 36th Viceroy of Portuguese India , left the management of the property to his authorized signatories , as he himself was mainly in Goa (India). He commissioned his authorized signatories to find residents who would use the land for agricultural purposes in return for monthly fees and who would also like to settle there.
Caetano de Melo e Castro died in 1718. In 1755, the great Lisbon earthquake destroyed all homes built on Monserrate to date. After the loss of the lamentable dead and those who left Monserrate thereafter, the property appeared to be in decline.
Gerard DeVisme
The wife of Caetano de Melo e Castro, Dona Francisca Xavier Mariana de Faro Melo e Castro , did not give up and tried to lease Monserrate again, convinced of the advantages that Monserrate / Sintra offered. Gerard DeVisme, an English trader who made his fortune by trading Brazilian precious wood (who held the trading monopoly around 1760 thanks to the Marques de Pombal ), probably came from the then Dutch consul in Portugal, Daniel Guilmeester, who was also active in the diamond trade himself , to Sintra. Gerard DeVisme was impressed by the area, but despite all efforts to acquire Monserrate, all he managed to get in 1790 was the nine-year lease with a building permit. Gerard DeVisme started work immediately. He had the apartments destroyed by the earthquake in 1755 rebuilt, the extensive area walled and gated, the ruined chapel rebuilt elsewhere, and DeVisme built a palace in neo-Gothic style on the elevation .
DeVisme stayed in Monserrate until 1794 and returned to England when he saw his monopoly on the Brazilian precious wood trade endangered with the resignation of the Marques de Pombal.
William Beckford
William Thomas Beckford became lessee of Gerard DeVisme around 1794. The quite wealthy Beckford used a large part of his personal wealth to "give the DeVisme-built palace a new face". But the surrounding landscape should now also be converted into a romantic garden.
Beckford stayed in Monserrate less than two years. After returning to England, he returned to Portugal in 1798. During his stay in England from 1795 to 1798, Monserrate was leased again, this time to the children of a nobleman and high official of the royal court by the name of José de Oliveira. With his now third stay in Portugal (October 1798 - June 1799) Beckford extended the lease with the heirs of Gerard DeVisme for a period of nine years without interruptions. However, Beckford broke his tents in Portugal in 1799 and he was now leaving Monserrate for good, and the property appeared to be in decline.
George Gordon Byron, sixth Baron of Byron, associated with Sintra and Portugal and better known here as Lord Byron , visited Portugal in 1809 when he was 21 years old.
Byron arrived in Lisbon with his friend John Hobhouse and servants Fletcher, Murray and Bob. John Hobhouse left entries in his travel journal in Latin about the visit to Portugal. His impressions of Sintra / Monserrate and the palace later found their place in the work Child Harold Pilgrimage (XXII – XXIII) .
At Monserrate and the palace and country estate, which were devoted to decay, Byron noticed how difficult the vegetation made it for the visitor to get through the open gates and doors into the halls that were empty there, "without a soul".
In 1828 a colored lithograph by James Bulwer with the title A Farm or Residence of Mr. Beckford and tje above Collares found an apparently well-preserved palace, but in a work by Hoffmann from 1848 one can clearly see the decay including the central dome without any roofing.
Web links
- Entry Palácio de Monserrate in the Department of Cultural Property of the Portuguese Ministry of Culture DGPC
Individual evidence
- ^ Entry of the Palácio de Monserrate in the Portuguese list of monuments SIPA, accessed on February 6, 2018