The politician who plotted his comeback here
In Linhó, a hillside village above Sintra, Marcelo Caetano used a summer house from 1958 to plot his return to power after being pushed from government, eventually becoming Portugal's 101st Prime Minister in 1968 and the last leader of the Estado Novo before its fall in 1974.
A rector plotted his return from a hillside house
Marcelo Caetano had already lost his power once. He served as a minister under the Estado Novo regime. He also served as Rector of the University of Lisbon. By the late 1950s he was out of government. Rivals closer to dictator António de Oliveira Salazar had pushed him aside. He kept a summer house in Linhó, then a scatter of manor houses and quintas in the hills above Sintra.
Starting in 1958, Caetano began using that house for something more than rest. He hosted meetings there, drawing in allies and waiting for his moment. For a decade he worked the house as a base for his return. He was a rector in exile from real power. He plotted from a village most Lisbon politicians barely noticed.
The moment came in 1968, when Salazar suffered a stroke and the regime needed a successor. Caetano took the job. He became the 101st Prime Minister of Portugal. He was the last leader of the Estado Novo. The regime would fall just six years later in the Carnation Revolution of 1974. A street in Linhó still carries his name, over the objections of people who want it changed because of what the regime he led represented.
A combative poet settled into the same quiet village
South African poet Roy Campbell arrived in Linhó in 1956, settling into the same hillside quiet that had drawn Caetano. He had spent decades as a restless, combative figure in English-language poetry. He was a bullfighting enthusiast. He had been a controversial supporter of Franco during the Spanish Civil War. In Linhó he found a late home. He stayed until he died.
Neither man's Linhó bears much resemblance to the village today. 860 meters from where you stand, the old manor houses have given way to Quinta da Penha Longa and Quinta da Beloura. These are gated resort communities with golf courses and tennis academies. A Ritz-Carlton once hosted a Bilderberg Meeting here. The transformation from Caetano's quiet plotting ground happened within a few decades. Most of it came after both men were gone. Today it is a summer address for Portugal's expatriates and global elite.
A stopgap school for engineers' children grew into an institution
The quiet that drew a poet and a plotting politician to Linhó did not last. In 1956 a group of American engineers working on Lisbon's Salazar Bridge needed somewhere to school their children. An Irish professor named Anthony A. McKenna opened Carlucci American International School of Lisbon that year. The school was housed miles away in a manor outside Lisbon.
The school outgrew that building. In 1997 its foundation made a deal with the Sintra municipal government. They got a new site on land near Quinta da Beloura. The land was granted on permanent lease. Builders raised a purpose-built campus a short walk from the old summer houses of Linhó.
In 1998 Hillary Clinton, then First Lady of the United States, cut the ribbon on the new campus. The school had started as a stopgap for bridge engineers' kids. It had become something else entirely. It was now a State Department-recognized institution. It drew students from more than fifty countries.
A shopping centre gave way to a new campus
A shopping center once stood on the Quinta da Beloura grounds. It served the resort community that had grown up around Linhó's golf courses. By the 2020s it was gone.
In its place, the TASIS Schools group, a Swiss network of American international schools, built TASIS Portugal. Architect David Mayernik designed the new buildings. He had already designed a campus for TASIS in Switzerland. It opened in 2020 as the fourth school in the TASIS network.
Where shoppers once parked, elementary and middle school students now follow American curricula. A high school is growing alongside them. The site changed hands and purpose again. It was the same way Caetano's summer house and Campbell's late retreat had done so decades before.
Linhó has rewritten itself every generation or two. A rector hid his ambition here. A poet hid from the world here. Engineers' children were schooled here, then diplomats' children, then the children of anyone who could afford a gated address in the hills above Sintra.
The village Caetano once used for secrecy now advertises itself to the whole world.
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