Palácio da Comenda

A dilapidated palace in a prime location. Future plans are speculative.

Located near the access road, the building offers plenty of reasons for speculation from many vantage points. Let’s clear things up: the Palácio da Comenda is a shabby 26-room villa spread over five floors. Reportedly, this abandoned property, along with 600 hectares of land, changed hands for 50 million some time ago. Currently, tabloids are buzzing about the closure of the private beach section and a few meters of the Camino de Santiago affected by it. The specific plans for the area range from a luxury hotel to Elon Musk — all speculative.

Whatever happens, it will draw on its luxurious history: over centuries, the location has seen visits from celebrities and nobility — a spectrum from Vasco da Gama to Jackie Kennedy, whose sister is rumored to have even worked on the interior design. How did it come to be? As expected in the area, it starts with the Knights of Santiago. In the Middle Ages, they erected a tower, which was later expanded into the ”Comenda” — a regional administrative unit of the Order. From 1495, da Gama oversaw it, hosting half the court here at times to escape the plague.

Later, the Comenda was transformed into a small fortress, whose remains were bought in 1872 by the Chief of Staff of the French Foreign Minister. His son, also a Count of Armand, eventually hired a young architect to design the current building: a ”hideaway” modeled after the Côte d'Azur.

 

Raul Lino is like the Portuguese Frank Lloyd Wright: seeking a typical national architecture. Unlike Bauhaus & Co., he understood it traditionally, in the sense of organic building. An example ”of defending tradition against modernity and modernism in tradition” is the 1908 Palácio da Comenda. Critics noted Lino’s proximity to Salazar.

 

 

The Armands belonged to Parisian high society and likely met Caroline Lee Bouvier at a cultural event in the early 1950s — an American with French roots traveling through Europe with her sister, the future Jackie Kennedy. They arranged their first meeting in Portugal, and the Comenda became a summer house for stars: Capote, Givenchy, Hepburn, basically the Kennedy circle. One can speculate why paragons of free-spirited capitalist culture hung out in a dictatorship — Kennedy even tried to overthrow Salazar.

However, Portugal was a haven for titled and/or wealthy nobility during WWII, and evidently, celebrities found peace here. This was especially evident after the assassination of JFK, when Jackie retreated to Setúbal with her children.

 

The Kennedy sisters in Setúbal. Must have been nice.

 

 

The last owner was António Xavier de Lima, a self-made millionaire who made his money through somewhat dubious land ownership at the end of the Estado Novo — ”the godfather” of today’s suburbs of Sesimbra and particularly Quinta do Conde. Let’s see if ”the depressed soccer mom” Madonna will strike again …