Mysterious inverted tower of the Freemasons

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

The well with spiral walls seems to go to an unattainable depth and is called the Inverted Tower or the Well of Initiation.

Many tourists, going on a trip to Portugal, set themselves a visit to the palace complex on a mandatory schedule.

Story

Once this place was an ordinary estate with classical buildings, which was owned by the baroness, but at the end of the 19th century the property was bought by the millionaire Carvalho Monteiro, who made a fortune selling Brazilian coffee and decided to settle in Portugal. There he acquired the Quinta da Regaleira estate in order to turn it into a piece of Masonic architecture that is completely unusual for ordinary people.

The palace itself, the chapel and household buildings were not distinguished by anything remarkable, but many gloomy tunnels run through the territory, connecting buildings, a pond, artificial grottoes … Monteiro was a Freemason, and therefore everything that surrounded him endowed with a certain symbolism with a deep meaning.

For example, the tunnel system symbolized the borderline between darkness and light, between warm and cold. And a person descending into these tunnels had to be aware of this transition, feel it on his body, see with his eyes, feel.

The system of tunnels, I must say, was confusing and reminiscent of a labyrinth, because some of the passages did not end in anything and inside it was possible to get lost

Inverted tower

Still, the most unusual of all that is on the territory of the complex is the so-called inverted tower or the well of initiation. This is where the deep meaning just rolls over.

It is considered that it was in this well that the Masons could accept a newcomer into their ranks, giving him a number of tasks and forcing him to go through the "9 circles of hell", which, in fact, depict flights of stairs, encircling a well of 30 meters deep in a spiral.

The well is not so easy to find on the territory, because it was skillfully hidden under mossy stones, which seemed to have been here all their life. Being 5 meters from the entrance, tourists may not understand that they are standing next to the main attraction … If you look inside the well, then the associations really come to mind with a tower that was turned inside out and stuck into the ground.

At the very bottom, on the floor, you can discern the famous Templar cross, but here it is framed by an eight-pointed star, on one of the walls you can see a triangle - a classic sign of Freemasonry. And going down the stairs to the bottom, you find yourself in front of the entrance to the tunnel, which, as we remember, is a labyrinth - go and get out into the light.

It is noteworthy that Carvalho Monteneiro also built a tomb for himself, all adorned with symbols, but it is unlocked only with the key that could open the palace on this estate and Monteneiro's house in the capital.