Quinta do Monte

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Quinta do Monte, photo, 1934

The Quinta do Monte , also Quinta Gordon , Quinta Cossart , Quinta Rocha Machado or more recently Quinta Jardins do Imperador , is a mansion in Monte , above Funchal on the Madeira Island in Portugal . It is the house where Karl von Habsburg-Lothringen , the last emperor of Austria and the last king of Hungary , Croatia and Bohemia, died .

history

The property, which was later mainly used as a weekend house and summer residence , was originally a winery (Portuguese "Quinta"). It lay high above the sea in magnificent oak and plane trees and was named after its various owners, in particular after the British merchant and consul James Dempster Webster Gordon (1783–1850), who built the manor house that still exists today according to plans by a British architect Was built in 1825 taking into account local building traditions in the style of the Regency and in 1826 he moved with his newly wedded wife Theodosia Arabella Pollock (1803-1859), the niece of the British general George Pollock .

Jardim Malakoff gardens with rose borders and marble fountain, 2018
Torre Malakoff (Malakoff Tower) observation tower overlooking Funchal , 2018

The first mention of the six hectare property dates back to 1784. The then owner, the merchant José Crisóstomo Costa e Silva, lost his fortune years later and sold the property to the local clergyman Simão Lúcio Nóbrega. It was later bought by the British wine merchant Thomas Gordon (1737-1804), the father of James Gordon. In 1840, the British draftsman and lithographer Andrew Picken (1815-1845) was invited to capture the Gordon family and the estate in watercolors. Adalbert von Prussia visited the house in 1842, Karl Bernhard von Sachsen-Weimar-Eisenach in 1847 , and Charlotte von Belgium in 1859 . When James Gordon died in 1850, his eldest son, Major Webster Thomas Gordon (* 1828), became the new owner. This left the inheritance to his brother Russell Manners Gordon (1829-1906) in 1851. He married the Portuguese Countess of Torre Bela, Filomena Gabriela Correia Brandão Henriques de Noronha (1839–1925) in 1857, and became the island's largest land and winery owner. By 1860 he had the area around the house expanded into a botanical park and landscape garden. He named a rose garden in it after the French Crimean War commander Aimable Pélissier, Duke of Malkoff , the conqueror of Fort Malakoff near Sevastopol . A pavilion or observation tower, the Torre Malakoff , which was originally built to store garden tools, was also dedicated to him (→ Malakoff Tower ).

In 1870 Russell Manners Gordon decided to sell the manor to his business partner, the wine merchant Peter Cossart (1807-1870), who had come to Madeira from Dublin in 1831. In 1890 the banker Luís da Rocha Machado II bought the property from his heirs. In 1894 Elisabeth of Austria-Hungary visited the house, in 1901 the Portuguese King Carlos I and his wife Amélie d'Orléans were invited to a garden party, in 1908 the Portuguese King Manuel II was a guest.

In 1922, Luíz da Rocha Machado III., A staunch monarchist, offered the exiled Austrian Emperor Charles I free of charge to move to Quinta do Monte with his wife Zita , her staff and six of their children, who had meanwhile moved to Madeira , after the almost penniless Majesties could no longer pay their bill at Reid's Palace near Funchal, where they had previously lodged. The house, which the imperial family moved into on February 18, 1922, was hardly adequately heated and, due to its mountainous location, was characterized by windy and cold, damp climates in winter. The shivering emperor soon caught the flu. On April 1, 1922, he died of pneumonia. The emperor was buried a few days later in the church of Nossa Senhora do Monte . In memory of him, the Rocha Machado family had a chapel built on the property in the second half of the 1920s. In 1968, ex-Empress Zita, accompanied by her children Otto and Adelheid and her cousin, Duke Duarte Nuno von Braganza (1907–1976), paid a souvenir visit to the site.

Fire ruin, photo 2018

Because the Rocha Machado family and their heirs, their daughters Josefina Rocha Machado Amador and Helena Rocha Machado e Couto, and their children no longer lived in and looked after the manor house from around 1975, the building and park fell into disrepair. During this time it was temporarily left to the artist Lourdes Castro (* 1930) as a residence and studio. In 1991 the facility was acquired by the Madeira Regional Government to house a Madeira University facility . This project was abandoned in 1998. After the monument had been extensively restored and converted into a botanical garden, museum and cultural center by around 2006, it fell victim to a large-scale forest fire in August 2016. On April 8, 2018, the gardens were reopened as Jardim do Imperador (German "Kaisergarten"). A Museum of Romanticism has now been set up in the quinta .

literature

  • Noël Cossart: Madeira. The Island Vineyard . Published by Penelope Mansell-Jones at Christie's Wine Publications, London 1984, ISBN 978-0-9034-3233-7 , p. 49.

Web links

Commons : Quinta Gordon  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Richard Starklof: The life of Duke Bernhard of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach . EF Thienemann, Gotha 1866, Volume 2, p. 157 ( Google Books )
  2. ↑ Karl Werkmann : The dead on Madeira . Verlag für Kulturpolitik, Munich 1923, p. 307
  3. ↑ Gordon Brook-Shepherd : To Crown and Empire. The tragedy of the last Habsburg emperor. Molden, Vienna / Munich / Zurich 1968 (translated from English by Johannes Eidlitz), p. 384
  4. ^ Daniela Schetar, Friedrich Köthe: Island trip Madeira with Porto Santo . Verlag Peter Rump, Bielefeld 2019 ( Google Books )
  5. ^ Susanne Röhl, Dagmar Kluthe, Holger Leue: Madeira. Time for the best . Bruckmann Verlag, 2019, ISBN 978-3-7343-0835-2 ( Google Books ).

Coordinates: 32 ° 40 ′ 28 "  N , 16 ° 54 ′ 31"  W.