Tapada das Necessidades

Park · EstrelaLisbon,Portugal

Ten walled hectares of former royal hunting ground inside Lisbon, untended for a century, with peacocks and a collapsing glasshouse in it.

The Tapada das Necessidades is ten hectares of walled ground inside the city that nobody has taken in hand for a century. The paths are dirt, the lake is green and half-choked, and the planting has simply gone on growing. In the middle of it stands the wreck of a glasshouse: most of its glass is gone, and plants push through the iron frame. Peacocks have the run of the place. It has not been restored, and there is no sign that it will be. The estate was a walled enclosure attached to the Necessidades palace, kept for one family's own use, and it lost that use in 1910. Nothing has been decided for it since. The neighbourhood behaves as if it were a park, which is what it has become: dogs, runners, people reading on the grass, teenagers on the wall. The palace is government offices and closed, so the grounds are the part you can walk in.

Worth knowing

Good to know

There is not a metre of surfaced ground inside the walls — the paths are dirt, uneven and muddy after rain, so this is a shoes decision before it is a walk.
The gates are locked at dusk — there is no lighting, and it gets dark under the trees well before the light goes from the streets outside.
Nothing inside is for sale — there is no café, no drinking water and no lavatory, because this is a neighbourhood park in a ruined royal estate rather than a visitor site.

Things to do

1
Walk to the glasshouse and stop at the fence
Follow the path to the cactus house and stop at the barrier; the unsound sections are fenced and you cannot go in. From the side you can see the whole length of the frame with the ribs still in line, and from the end it is mostly sky. It is the reason most people come through the gates.
2
Find the shape of the old garden
Walk the slope from the top gate downwards and look for lines rather than for plants. Old trees standing in a row mark where an avenue ran, and the lake keeps its outline under the vegetation. Once you have found two of those lines the rest of the layout falls into place under the scrub.
3
Use it the way the neighbourhood does
Take a book or a coffee bought outside, find the open ground on the western slope and stay there. From it the river, the bridge and the far bank stand above the wall. There is nothing to buy, nothing to queue for and no route to follow, and on a weekday afternoon it is used almost entirely by the people who live around it.