The Portuguese Queen who was crowned after death

Quinta das Lágrimas is the site where this love story took place.

Quinta das Lágrimas was founded in 1995 and is a member of the Small Luxury Hotels of the World since then. It is considered one of the best hotels in Portugal and this is a mention that we can confirm. We had an amazing time in this Hotel which is also a member of the Portuguese Association of Historical Gardens.

I visited this property first when I was a child, during a school visit and it was on my romantic memories since then due to its amazing gardens, with about 51 different plants from all over the world, including one of the most extraordinary trees on the property, a giant Australian banyan, so often mistaken for a rubber tree.

But this property is also related to one of the most beautiful love stories, the story of Pedro and Inês.

It all took place 650 years ago. Pedro and Inês fell in love but it was an impossible love. Pedro was heir to the throne that his father, King Afonso IV, occupied. Inês was a courtier of Galician origin and daughter of one of the most powerful men in Spain, who in turn was the grandson of Sancho IV, the King of Castile, as was D. Pedro, which mean that Pedro and Inês were cousins. Dona Constança, the wife of Dom Pedro and the future Queen of Portugal, was also Inês cousin.

She was related to the Albuquerque family as well, Afonso Sanchez, the illegitimate son of Dom Dinis, whom Dom Afonso IV considered an enemy and who had pushed the country into a civil war, betrothed the lady of the castle of Albuquerque, whom Inês de Castro called mother because she had been raised by her. This becomes the first source of the hatred between Afonso IV and Inês.

In 1350 a group of nobles from Castile were in revolt against their King Pedro of Spain. The mentor of the insurrection was precisely João Afonso de Albuquerque, the son of Afonso Sanches, and, therefore, a kind of adoptive brother to Inês. João Afonso de Albuquerque surely tried to influence Inês into involving prince Dom Pedro (her lover) in the Castilian Civil War. The attempt to influence Dom Pedro came to such a point that in 1354 one of Dona Inês’s brothers traveled to Portugal to try to exert his influence over Dom Pedro and offered him the crown of Castile (Dom Pedro was the grandson of Sancho IV). Dom Pedro did not accept the offer for the sole reason that his father was against it.

It is known that the forest surrounding the Palace was, in the 14th Century a hunting reserve belonging to the royal family, which at the time resided in Coimbra. Pedro and Inês used to secretly meet here to prevent anything from disturbing their love. Inês lived in Santa-Clara-a-Velha Convent, not more than five hundred meters away from the property. There is a narrow conduit on the property currently called the “Lovers Fountain” that led to the Convent.

It is believed that the water running in the conduit was used to transport the love letters which Pedro and Inês exchanged. According to the legend, the prince would place the letters on little wooden boats, which were driven by the current all the way into the delicate hands of Inês.

It is also said that it was in “Mata das Lágrimas” (the Forest of Tears) that Inês was murdered by three of the King’s knights. From the tears of Inês shed sprung “Fonte das Lágrimas” (the Fountain of Tears) and the blood from her body stained the rock; the red marks will remain for eternity.

When Pedro was crowned King, in spite of the solemnly sworn oaths, he had the murderers of Inês – who had fled the prince’s fury to Castile – captured and killed.

In 1360, King Dom Pedro announced he had secretly betrothed Inês and, on the same occasion, he had two monumental tombs erected in the Monastery of Alcobaça in South Centre of Portugal.

The body of Dona Inês was transferred to the Monastery and Dom Pedro was later buried here. It is said that Inês was crowned in Alcobaça (in the Lusiadas, Camões tell us that Inês “was proclaimed Queen after death”) and the court was forced to pay regal respect to the “Queen” in a ceremony of besamanos.

Throughout the centuries, the story of Pedro and Inês has been narrated by the most brilliant writers worldwide, namely António Ferreira, Voltaire, Victor Hugo, Ezra Pound, Stendhal, Agostina Bessa-Luís, Manuel Alegre, amongst many others, and now Quinta das Lágrimas is waiting for your visit to live your own love story with a happy-end.

Additional references to this love story and to Dona Inês de Castro:

Inês de Castro's story is immortalized in several plays and poems in Portuguese, such as The Lusíadas by Luís de Camões (canto iii, stanzas 118-135), and Spanish, such as Nise lastimosa and Nise laureada (1577) by Jerónimo Bermúdez, Reinar despues de morir by Luís Vélez de Guevara, as well as by the comtesse de Genlis (Inès de Castro, 1826), and in a play by French playwright Henry de Montherlant called La Reine morte (The Dead Queen). Inês de Castro is a novel by Maria Pilar Queralt del Hierro (es) in Spanish and Portuguese.
Plays written in English include Aphra Behn's Agnes de Castro, or, the Force of Generous Love (1688); and Catharine Trotter Cockburn's Agnes de Castro (1695). Mary Russell Mitford also wrote a drama from the story entitled Inez de Castro.
Felicia Hemans' poem The Coronation of Inez de Castro first appeared in The New Monthly Magazine in 1828.
She is a recurring figure in Ezra Pound's The Cantos. She appears first at the end of Canto III, in the lines Ignez da Castro murdered, and a wall/Here stripped, here made to stand.
There have been over 20 operas and ballets created about Inês de Castro. Operas from the 18th and 19th centuries include:
Ines di Castro by Bernhard Anselm Weber (1790, Hanover)
Ines di Castro by Niccolò Antonio Zingarelli (1798)
Ines de Castro by Walter Savage Landor (1831)
Ines de Castro by Giuseppe Persiani to a libretto by Salvadore Cammarano (1835)
Ines di Castro by Pietro Antonio Coppola (1842, Lisbon).
In modern times, Inês de Castro has continued to inspire operatic works, including:
Ines de Castro by Scottish composer James MacMillan. This work was first performed at the 1996 Edinburgh International Festival.
Wut [de] (Rage) in German by Swiss composer Andrea Lorenzo Scartazzini. The world premiere of this work was given at the Theater Erfurt, Germany, on 9 September 2006.
Ines de Castro by American composer Thomas Pasatieri. This work premiered in 1976 with the Baltimore Opera Company.
Ines by Canadian composer James Rolfe. Premiered in 2009 by the Queen of Puddings Music Theatre Company in Toronto.
In addition, Portuguese composer Pedro Camacho (born 1979) composed the Requiem to Inês de Castro, first performed on March 28, 2012 in New Cathedral of Coimbra on the occasion of 650 years of the transportation of Ines de Castro's body from Coimbra to Alcobaça Monastery. Christopher Bochman, with the Lisbon Youth Orchestra, has produced an opera "Corpo E Alma" (Body and Soul) focusing on Pedro's transition from a sensual to a spiritual love following her death, drawing on various aspects of the tale.