winchou: Cabo da Roca e Convento dos Capuchos

We return to Sintra today to check a couple more places off our list. We are slowly visiting palácios further and further west of the train station and have reached the practical limit of things trains, feet, and tuk-tuks can reach. Our friends take us by car today, so we can go as far west as we like (or as our good friends are graciously willing to take us). In this case, it's as far west as possible while staying on continental Europe: Cabo da Roca. This translates roughly to "the sea cliffs", and my mind stretches back to a neighborhood in San Francisco, where the city breaks down to sandy paths, on a sliver of very expensive real estate just west of the Golden Gate. It's the edge of the world.

Today's intended destination is the Convento dos Capuchos de Santa Cruz, which was founded in 1560 by Dom Álvaro de Castro. José Saramago wrote wistfully of it in his Journey to Portugal – a volume that forms the core of the list on my iPhone's Maps app. According to Saramago, the immense riches contained in Pena, Regaleira, and Monserrate are only possible because of the offsetting poverty and penance in the Convento:

As for putting words together, remember how Philip II did so when he boasted that the sun never set on the lands he governed, and then went on to say that his kingdoms contained the richest and poorest convents in the world: the Escorial and the Capuchin one at Sintra? But Philip II had everything: the greatest wealth and the worst poverty, which naturally enough meant he could choose. Kings have the strange privilege of being praiseworthy either way: when they enjoy the wealth that goes with their station, or when they are poor, like all those they never bothered to help. What they sought for the peace of their souls was to be able to go and drop in on poverty whenever they wanted to, by coming to visit the friars.

We wind our way out of Cascais, and the fine homes and seaside restaurants scattered there on the shore. Again, I feel like I'm riding out to Point Reyes Light, where the forest dissolves into rough beaches, dunes, and farmland. And as expected, there is a lighthouse here, too: the Farol de Cabo da Roca and a stone pillar with a cross, within a promontory atop a wide cliff. The heavens above us are clear, but the sky and sea are a blue-hued gradient with just a wash of clouds. Beyond the hazy horizon, here be dragons – and Boston.

We turn east and drive to the forest. Our arrival at the Convento is met with construction noise. There is a significant restoration project underway, with sleeved saplings, earthworks, and a sheer, steel-colored construction fence splitting the wooded site. I pick up our tickets, and looking to my left, I see the walkway is roped-off, with the construction fence just on the other side. So we take the road on the right and begin our walk.

A stone wall directs us deeper in the trees, but the GPS on my phone want us to stay left, where there is a gated road. We follow the wall and reach a water treatment plant, which seems 'wrong', and return to the gated road. This road takes us by a staging area for the restoration project, with a large shed, tools, and supplies. There are distant views out to the shore, but no way in to the Convento.

So we double-back to the ticket office, where the wise-cracking ranger asks us if we know where we are going – muito obrigado. Peering past the roped-off walkway, we realize there is a temporary path, marked with short posts and more rope, in the shade along the construction fence. With apologies to our friends, and we soon discover the entrance, which during COVID, includes a QR code to download a map (download doesn't work; a partial image here).

The approach involves a terraced ramp with a cross on a marker, in the shape of 'home plate', among the mossy pavers. When we reach the marker, we see that there is a very narrow set of steps behind it and an awkward slot through the wall – as if you must make a conscious, uncomfortable decision to enter. We reach a small courtyard, the Terreiro das Cruzes. There is another cross-topped marker on the periphery, and an angry-looking cork is thrusting about in the center. Just behind a colossal boulder, we find the Pórtico das Fragas (top image). There's a wooden gate and another set of mossy steps; a small arch with a bell is fixed precariously on the tip of the boulder.

Up the stairs to a second marker and cross, and we arrive at a landing called the Terreiro do Campanário, just behind the bell arch. We are greeted by another shadowy, twisty tree, which guides us up to a patio known as the Terreiro do Fonte. To our left are stone tables and benches, and a wonderfully aged, tile-trimmed fountain. The Terreiro forms a perspectival approach to the Entrada, a broad and open porch.

The Entrada is focused around a low, arched apse, again decorated with decaying azujelos and colored stones. Under the porch, there are five doorways: two on-level left and right, and three behind the low apse, up a few steps – the two directly behind the apse forming the lower part of a cross made of cortiça (cork bark). Looking up, I see that the entire ceiling is covered in patterned cortiça.

Other visitors are in the other doorways, so I take the door on my immediate left. There is a cross above the door frame made from small white pebbles with the inscription: Louvado seja santíssimo sacramento ("praise be most holy sacrament'). Through the door, and there is substantial boulder floating above a wooden gate, and an elaborate tile altar with a small marble altarpiece. The downloaded literature tells me this is the Igreja, given by the the Castro family; their family coat of arms in stone is on the left.

I am ready to try one of the other five doorways, but there is a portal next to the coat of arms, with a tight stairway up to a small-ish dark room. This is the Coro Alto, but it's not that high and the choir would need to be quite small; it's a deep, cork-lined room with facing built-in benches.

Before I head out again, I notice a another small portal on the other end of the bench, with a steep stairway up. There is a a small, almost 'modern' stone basin in the wall on the left. I decide to just take a peek before I return to the Entrada. Not quite a spiral, at the top of the tight winders, I can see down a extremely narrow, dimly lit hallway. The quarto on my immediate right seems larger than the others. There are a further seven tiny-tiny door openings framed in cortiça. The monks' Dormitórios are not big enough to have a lay down; I'm not sure I could squeeze through the opening. The white-washed stone cells are absolutely minimalist, each with a little shelf and window seat carved in the exterior wall.

The COVID rules demand that we not touch anything but it would be impossible to get up the stairs and down the passage without touching some things, even harder trying to take pictures – it's barely wide enough to turn around.

At the end of the corridor, down a step or two, the hallway pours into an intersection. Strait ahead is a larger room with an open window. Once inside I understand this must be the Cozinha, the kitchen. On my right, there is a kind of crenellated structure where charcoal may burn beneath a kettle. To the right of that is a small pass-through, the colorful glazed surface worn down to fired clay. The pass-through allows access to the Refeitório, a small dining room with a low stone table. Near the pass-through is a cortiça cross; visitors have scrawled their names in the surrounding wall face. To the left are a number of shelves that form the pantry, along with low, shallow countertops for food prep.

I continue to think that there are four more doorways back at the Entrada to explore, but there is another egress that brings me to a verdant outdoor walkway, just behind the monks' cells. I make a quick trip down, and find a large communal Casa das Águas, with latrines and an unshielded wash area. The plumbing infrastructure throughout is thoughtfully executed: the basins, fountains, and this wash area.

Returning to the intersection, I see another stairway to the left of the outdoor walkway. I decide on one more quick look.

Up the steps, by another wash basin on the left, I enter a larger stair hall that connects some 'normal-sized' rooms with taller cork door frames. The windowless room on the left is marked with another cross; the dim and silent Cela da Penitência is used for meditation. In the far corner of the stair hall is what might be a heater of fireplace – I am not certain. On the right are the Enfermarias, nurseries for young plants. Next to these and a few more steps up, there are the Alojamentos, brighter, more comfortable guest rooms which look out to the Claustro. Continuing up, I reach the Quarto Superior, which seems to be a bedroom or workspace, but might be the local 'presidential suite' – I've lost all sense of scale.

Returning down to the stair hall, I notice that next to the basin the stair splits and continues to the right. I go up to the Biblioteca, another office-like workspace. Finishing at the bottom of the stairs, near the back entry, is the Sala do Capítulo (chapter house), a circular meeting room with cork-cushioned seating and a tile altar. The votive figure indicated on the map is missing, Nossa Senhora das Dores (our lady of pains). The door to the Claustro brings me outside again (this blog contains a useful set of floor plans).

Saramago, as 'the traveller', describes life in the Convento:

It must have been a sign of true humility to choose to live and die here. These tiny doors, obliging even a child to bend down to pass through, demanded the radical submission of body and soul, and the cells they gave on to must have caused their limbs to shrink. How many men could have put themselves through this, or rather, come in search of this self-denial? In the chapterhouse there is only room for half a dozen people, the refectory is like a toy one, with a stone table taking up nearly all the room, and the constant mortification of benches made from wood with rough bark still on it. The traveller thinks for a moment what it must mean to be a friar. To him, so much a man of this world, there is something mysterious and intriguing about someone who leaves his home and work, goes to knock on the convent door, asks: “Let me in,” and from then on is oblivious to everything; even when the king was no longer Dom Sebastian but another one, it was all the same to the Capuchin friars.

Walking to the sunlight, onto a paved landing, I arrive at the Claustro, a generous courtyard shaded by another monstrous sobreiro (cork oak). Toward the octagonal pool, I observe the elevated entrance to the church, the Capela de Santo António. The sainted man himself is in fresco to the right of the door. On the left, is an image of São Franscico – the Friars Minor Capuchin are a part of the Franciscan Order.

In the Capela, the walls are covered in lively but faded pastels and linear stencils. A ripple of stones spill into the arched apse space above an azulejos panel with an inscription that refers to 1 Peter 2:24 and translates as:

PECCATA NOST/RA IPSE PERTUL/LIT SUPER LI/GNUM
[our sins He endured on a wood (cross)]

Looking at the Claustro from the Capela, I notice two stone piers among the flower beds. These plantings are called out on the map as the Herbolário, a lab for medicinal plants. I take the opening there and re-enter the building near a primitive stone formation – it might be a fountain or another wash basin. At the other end of this 'chute', I find myself back at the Entrada.

Checking over my shoulder, I realize I'm in front of one of the five doorways, one marked with a skull and cross-bones and with a mosaic of seashells forming a cross. On the map, it is called the Porta de Morte, a transit between the material and the spiritual. I recall that the Capela dos Ossos in Évora was also built by the Franciscans.

The two large rooms behind the Entrada apse seem be related to gardening or are part of the Herbolário – I cannot be sure. Partially excavated, one floor slab appears to be rammed earth, the other (surprisingly), old brick pavers. Down the steps, I land at the last of the five doorways.

The last doorway is the most grand: two large leaves framed in stone and cortiça, as well as strap-iron 'screen doors', with a white pebble cross and azujelos tiles over the threshold. This small chapel is the Capela da Paixão de Christo. On the right is a small window that looks out to the Terreiro do Fonte. On the left is an azulejos scene of Christ being bound and flogged.

I quickly recount from the nearby Capela de Santo António: "our sins He endured". Looking up to the tile in the barrel vault, there are images of other instruments of torture: a pair of pliers, a crown of thorns, a hammer, a length of chain, a set of horse whips.

This is an architecture of self-inflicted suffering, an architecture that amplifies self-denial in order to remove sin. Appropriately, I conclude my tour in this Capela, surrounded by stunning, eighteenth-century Portuguese azul e branco, in the most highly-decorated room in the compound, thinking not of heavenly reward but of the other-worldly effort required to achieve it. Saramago summarizes:

Even being as egotistic as they were, the Capuchins of the convent of Santa Cruz paid a high price. This heretical thought will probably mean the traveller is thrown out of paradise. He could take other roads, or try to hide in the vegetation, but then night would fall and he is not brave enough to confront darkness among these crags of the sierra. So instead he descends to the town, which means leaving paradise for the world, leaving behind too the shadows of the friars, whose only sin was the pride of thinking themselves saved.

In the Terreiros and the Entrada, my friends are no where to be found. Sign-posts suggest other points of interest, and I think I might be able to add to my experience while avoiding their inconvenience. I rush up the hill and into the forest. There are some old ruins, an abandoned fireplace, a collapsed roof. Up the hill there is a delightful stone gate set ajar, and the path rambles past; I press on.

Now, the boulders grow larger and I must climb. Up, over, and around a group of enormous stone forms, the path spills between the gnarled oaks. I see the moss on the face of the rocks is worn, and a man-made masonry gate appears within a break in the boulders. Inside, there are some old porcelain fragments on a stone bench or shelf. Above me, unnatural seams of light break the shadows – smaller rocks and pebbles are wedged-in to close the creases.

The Capela do Senhor Crucificado may be an extreme in the cross between the natural and the man-made. With the most minimal architectural interventions, a profound place of prayer and contemplation is created.

I text my friends as I scramble downhill, trying to observe what I can: amazing old corks, the Ermida do Ecce Homo, clay roof tiles, the dappled canopy, the Forno. Finally, the path drops me at the edge of a wide, level garden, now overgrown with grass but still bordered by rocks. My patient friends are chatting and waiting at the 'relief station' by the exit. We gather ourselves and decide to grab a late lunch at a crêperie in Cascais. I apologize again, catch my breath, and we march out – "leaving paradise for the world".