Excursion to Cintra.--Villa of Ramalhaô.--The
Garden.--Collares.--Pavilion designed by Pillement.--A convulsive
gallop.--Cold weather in July.
July 9th, 1787.
I was at the Marialva Palace by nine, and set off from thence with the
Marquis for Cintra. Having the command of the Queen’s stables, in which
are four thousand mules and two thousand horses, he orders as many
relays as he pleases, and we changed mules four times in the space of an
hour.
A few minutes after ten we were landed at Ramalhaô, a villa, under the
pyramidical rocks of Cintra, Signor S. Arriaga was so kind as to lend me
a month or two ago, and which I have not had time to visit till to-day.
The suite of apartments are spacious and airy, and the views they
command of sea and arid country boundless; but unless the heat becomes
more violent, I shall be cooler than I wish in them, as they contain
not a chimney except in the kitchen.
I found the garden in excellent order, and flourishing crops of
vegetables springing up between rows of orange and citron. Such is the
power of the climate, that the gardenias and Cape plants I brought with
me from England, mere stumps, are covered with beautiful blossoms. The
curled mallows, and some varieties of Indian-corn, sown by my English
gardener, have shot up to a strange elevation, and begin already to form
shady avenues and fairy forests, where children might play in perfection
at landscape-gardening.
After I had passed half-an-hour in looking about me, the Marquis and I
got into our chair and drove to his own villa; a new creation, which has
cost him a great many thousand pounds sterling. Five years ago it was a
wild hill bestrewn with flints and rocky fragments. At present you find
a gay pavilion designed by Pillement, and elegantly decorated; a
parterre with statues and fountains, thick alleys of laurel, bay, and
laurustine, cascades, arbours, clipped box-trees, and every ornament the
Portuguese taste in gardening renders desirable.
We dined at a clean snug inn, situated towards the middle of the village
of Cintra. The Queen has lately bestowed this house and a large tract of
ground adjoining it, upon the Marquis. From its windows and loggias you
look down deep ravines and bold slopes of woods and copses, variegated
with mossy stones and ancient decayed chesnuts.
As soon as the sun grew low we went to Collares, and walked on a terrace
belonging to M. la Roche, a French merchant, who has shown some
glimmering of taste in the laying out of his villa. The groves of pine
and chesnut starting from the crevices of rock, and rising one above
another to a considerable elevation, give Collares the air of an Alpine
village. Innumerable rills, overhung by cork-trees and branching lemons,
burst out of ruined walls by the wayside, and dash into marble basins. A
favourite attendant of the late king’s, who has a very large property in
these environs, invited us with much civility and obsequiousness into
his garden. I thought myself entering the orchards of Alcinous. The
boughs literally bent under loads of fruit; the slightest shake strewed
the ground with plums, oranges, and apricots.
This villa boasts a grand artificial cascade, with tritons and dolphins
vomiting torrents of water; but I paid it not half the attention its
proprietor expected, and retiring under the shade of the fruit-trees,
feasted on the golden apples and purple plums that were rolling about me
in such profusion. The Marquis, who shares with most of the Portuguese a
remarkable predilection for flowers, filled his carriage with carnations
and jasmine. I never saw plants more conspicuous for size and vigour
than those which have the luck of being sown in this fortunate soil. The
exposition likewise is singularly happy; skreened by sloping hills, and
defended from the sea-airs by several miles of thickets and orchards. I
felt unwilling to quit a spot so favoured by nature, and M---- flatters
himself I shall be tempted to purchase it.
The wind became troublesome as we ascended the hill, crowned by the
Marialva villa. The sky was clear and the sun set fiery. The distant
convent of Mafra, glowing with ruddy light, looked like the enchanted
palace of a giant, and the surrounding country bleak and barren as if
the monster had eaten it desolate. To repose ourselves a little after
our rapid excursion we entered the pavilion I told you just now
Pillement had designed. It represents a bower of fantastic Indian trees
mingling their branches, and discovering between them peeps of a summer
sky. From the mouth of a flying dragon depends a magnificent lustre for
fifty lights, hung with festoons of brilliant glass, that twinkle like
strings of diamonds.
We loitered in this saloon till it was pitch-dark. The pages riding full
speed before us with flaming torches, and the wind driving back sparks
and smoke full in our faces, I was stunned and bewildered, and
experienced, perhaps, the sensations of a novice in sorcery, mounted for
the first time behind a witch on a broomstick. In less than an hour we
had rattled over twelve miles of rough, disjoined pavement, going up and
down the steepest hills in a convulsive gallop, so that I expected every
instant to be thrown flat on my nose; but, happily, the mules were
picked from perhaps a hundred, and never stumbled. I found the air on
the heights above the Ajueda very keen and piercing.
It sounds strange to be complaining of cold at Lisbon on the ninth of
July.