A pleasant mansion and garden in Sintra: Biester

Elon Musk frets about our planet being underpopulated, a point of view likely to be confusing to anyone who has visited Sintra, Portugal. A garden built for quiet reflection, such as Quinta da Regaleira, will be packed with more than 1,000 tourists at a time in the shoulder seasons. It looks good from some angles, e.g.,

but to get into the most famous part, the “Initiation Well” (an underground tower), it was a 1.5-hour wait on June 12, 2024, less than two hours after the attraction opened:

How typical is this degree of crowding? Google said that we visited on an unusually quiet day:

Unless the city starts charging a $200 per person daily decongestion fee, there is no way to recreate the experience for which these palaces and gardens were built. You’ll be sitting in traffic and/or walking long distances up and down hills and waiting in line to get into even the smallest garden feature.

We found an exception to the above rules.. Biester Palace, the mansion that tourists haven’t learned about yet. Built with a banking fortune at the end of the 19th century, the palace appears to be in shabby condition in The Ninth Gate, a 1999 Roman Polanski (pregnant wife killed by Manson family) film starring Johnny Depp (future cash cow for Amber Heard until she made the mistake of partnering with the ACLU). There’s an entrance right next to Quinta da Regaleira and if you do decide to brave the Pena Palace you can exit via the top entrance to catch the bus there.

Here’s the view from the top of the park (mansion on the right side of the frame):

The interior hasn’t been redecorated to its former glory, but the rooms aren’t bare:

There are some great views of the Moorish castle above Sintra (Muslims controlled and colonized Sintra from about 722 AD until 1147):

Stop at the tea house for a friendly service, almost-free prices (about 1 euro for a coffee; 3.5 euros for a massive fresh-squeezed orange juice), and delicious pastry.