The exile who came here to die
Alameda da Fonte Velha in Sintra sits near a Roman Iron Age necropolis where seventeen Iron Age graves and sixteen Roman burials, cremated and buried with glass vessels, bracelets, rings and coins, were excavated across 1956 and again in 1984, close to the village of Linhó where the South African poet Roy Campbell spent his final year before his death in 1957.
A South African poet spent his last year at Linhó
Roy Campbell came to Linhó in 1956 looking for a place to settle. He was a South African poet, already in his fifties, known for a hard, combative style and a life spent moving between countries. He had fought in Spain, lived in France, and clashed publicly with other writers of his generation. Linhó, a quiet village above Lisbon, was one more stop, though nobody living there then could have known it would be his last.
He died the following year, in 1957. His body did not travel far. He was buried at two kilometers, the same graveyard that holds the Scottish cartographer John George Bartholomew and the Portuguese architect Raul Lino. Campbell's wife, Mary Garman, was later buried there too, more than twenty years after him.
The house Campbell lived in has not survived as a landmark the way the older buildings nearby have. But the ground under Linhó was already used to holding the newly arrived and the newly dead. A thousand paces from where Campbell settled, excavators found a much older cemetery. It was the Fonte Velha - Roman Iron Age necropolis. People were cremated and buried there with glass vessels and bracelets. This happened from the Iron Age through the fourth century AD. Nobody connects the two burial grounds directly. But the village had been receiving the dead for centuries. This happened long before a poet from South Africa came to spend his last year among them.
A fallen politician rebuilt his career from a village house
Marcelo Caetano had already lost his standing in the Estado Novo regime when he began spending summers in Linhó. He was a former Rector of the University of Lisbon. The government had pushed him out of favor. Starting in 1958, he used his Linhó house to host quiet meetings. He was rebuilding a political career from a village that asked no questions. The plan worked. Ten years later, in 1968, Marcelo Caetano became the 101st Prime Minister of Portugal. He was the last man to hold the office before the regime fell. A street in Linhó still carries his name, though there have been attempts to change it.
A school for engineers' children grew into an American campus
In 1956, the same year Campbell arrived in Linhó, a different kind of newcomer showed up nearby. American engineers were building the Salazar Bridge over the Tagus. They needed somewhere to send their children to school. An Irish professor named Anthony A. McKenna opened St. Columban's School to teach them. The children could slot back into American classrooms when their families moved on. The school outgrew its first home. It eventually settled on a purpose-built campus in Linhó. Hillary Clinton opened it in 1998. She was then First Lady of the United States. In 2001 it took a new name: the Carlucci American International School of Lisbon. It was named after Frank Carlucci. He was the US ambassador who steered relations with Portugal through the 1974 Carnation Revolution. It remains the only school in the country backed by the US State Department.
Cremated dead were buried here with glass and coins
Long before any of them arrived, the ground near Linhó was already a resting place for outsiders of a different kind. Estácio da Veiga dug the Fonte Velha necropolis. Santos Rocha dug it again in 1984. They found seventeen Iron Age graves and sixteen Roman burials. The Roman dead spanned the 1st to 4th centuries AD. Bodies were cremated. Then they were buried with glass vessels, bracelets, rings and small containers of perfume called unguentaria. Coins went in with the ashes.
A closed-door gathering of leaders met at a nearby resort
By the late twentieth century, Linhó had become a place the powerful chose deliberately, and quietly. In 1999 the Ritz-Carlton Penha Longa Resort hosted a meeting of the Bilderberg Group. It was built inside the Quinta da Penha Longa estate. The Bilderberg Group is an annual, closed-door gathering of political and business leaders from Europe and North America. No agenda was published and no minutes were released. This kept with the group's practice everywhere it meets. The village that had sheltered a dying poet and a plotting politician now sheltered men who wanted simply not to be seen at all.
The cemetery at São Pedro de Penaferrim still holds Roy Campbell's grave among the quiet lanes of a village that has spent centuries taking people in.
Every person, building and event in this story opens into its own dig in the app — and Strata will dig the ground under your feet instead, wherever that is, in about a minute, with every source shown.