MONSERRATE

The Palace of Monserrate is a palace inserted in the Park of Monserrate located in São Martinho, Sintra, district of Lisbon, Portugal.
In 1790 Gerad DeVisme (wealthy English merchant, representative and associate of DeVisme, Purry & Mellish, who obtained the monopoly of the Brazilian timber trade from the Marquis of Pombal) rents the farm to Dona Francisca Xavier Mariana from Faro Melo e Castro, having built the first palace in neo-Gothic style. It also demolished the chapel of the sixteenth century, having built another that would later be used by Francis Cook to create a false ruin. It will be in 1793 that William Beckford leases the property to DeVisme, investing largely in the palace but still more in the improvement of the gardens.
In 1601 the property was appraised to the family Melo and Castro until 1718 when it is finally acquired by D. Caetano de Melo e Castro, Christendom and Viceroy of India. Being the resident family in Goa the property was maintained by homemade ones, at least until 1755 when the violent earthquake left the houses uninhabitable.
There would have been a chapel in these lands, this one even before the reconquest of Sintra by D. Afonso Henriques, which would mark the burial of a Mozarabic Christian who had died fighting a rich Arab who ruled the area. In 1540, the clergyman Gaspar Preto ordered a chapel dedicated to Our Lady of Monserrate, at which time the hermitage and surrounding grounds belonged to the Hospital of All Saints of Lisbon.
In 1884 he is awarded the title of Baronet in England, living Sir Francis Cook until the age of 84. The property will remain in the possession of the Cook family until 1947 when Sir Herbert Cook is forced to sell the farm after the family lost much of the fortune in the first half of the twentieth century. In this sale it is lost the valuable filling of the palace that will be dispersed during the auction.
It is thought that during the construction will have worked in the palace more than 2000 people, 50 of which are used exclusively for gardening. After the works are finished, the Cooks employ about 300 people to look after the house, the park and the family. They buy 13 adjoining farms and the Capuchos Convent with their fence, becoming owners and employers of weight in the surrounding lands, much like what happened in the English country houses. By virtue of the work and efforts that Francis Cook had employed in the reconstruction of the fifth, as well as the construction of two primary schools (for the children of his staff) in Galamares and Colares, King D. Luis I grants him the title of Viscount of Monserrate.
The buyer was an English textile millionaire, Francis Cook, heir to Cook, Son & Co. The palace was designed by James Knowles and the gardens were targeted by landscaper William Stockdale, botanist William Nevill, and James Burt, master gardener , who would spend the rest of his life in Monserrate. Cook makes of Monserrate the summer residence of the family stuffing it with works of art of its enormous collection (today dispersed by numerous museums).
It was only in 1856 and after several decades of abandonment (with Beckford leaving Portugal at the end of the eighteenth century) that Quinta de Monserrate would leave the hands of the Melo e Castro family, in the person of José Maria de Castro, who returned from Goa and sold the to build a residence in Lisbon.
Saúl Fradesso da Silveira de Salazar Moscoso Saragga (1894-1964), an antique merchant from Lisbon, buys the palace and will sell it in 1949 to the Portuguese State, which buys 143 hectares of Tapada de Monserrate. The Serra de Sintra, where the palace is located, is classified as Cultural Landscape - Patrimony of Humanity by UNESCO in 1995 and in 2010 the restoration works of the Palace of Monserrate, now open to the public.

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