With these climatic conditions it is natural that this end of the ridge, protected on all sides, should develop a vegetation of extraordinary luxuriance. So remarkably was this the case that the successive ecclesiastical bodies to which it belonged for fifteen hundred years decreed that the woods were for ever to be held sacred as a place of sanctuary and devotion. From the eleventh century onward the domain belonged to the Archbishops of Braga, and in 1626 one of them granted it to the order of shoeless Carmelites, as a retreat remote from the world, where the monks following the strict Trappist rule might meditate in silence undisturbed by the turmoil of their fellow-men. In poverty, and with the hard labour of their own hands, the monks built the little monastery and humble church as they now stand, with other portions since demolished; and, year by year, for two hundred years, planted and tended with devout care the sacred wood which was their one earthly concern. From all quarters of the globe where the Portuguese flag waved, from India, South America, and the Far East, rare plants and trees were sent by Carmelites to their beloved “Matto de Bussaco.” Medicinal herbs, rare and lovely ferns, and exotic fruit and flowers, impossible in other places in Europe, here grew luxuriantly, and the silent, white-robed gardeners planted and tended their domain until it became not a wood but a sylvan garden of surpassing beauty, as it remains to-day. A high wall shuts it in from the rest of the world, whilst a special Bull of Urban VIII., deeply cut to this day upon a great slab on the principal gateway, condemned to major excommunication any person who violated the sanctuary or injured any plant within the sacred precincts; and another papal Bull bans any woman who dares to set her foot upon the domain. Beautiful terraced paths were cut upon the hillsides, and zigzagging down the ravines, fountains that gushed spontaneously from the mossy rocks were dedicated to saints and adorned with sculptured shrines or rustic grottoes. Everything that single-hearted toil and devotional spirit could do, for centuries the shoeless Carmelites did for their remote monastery and the fairy glens of Bussaco; and since the abolition of the monastic orders in Portugal, the Government have tended and guarded the spot as carefully as the silent monks before them. One trembles for each innovation in such a spot as this, and the present road-cutting operations through the wood and just around the palace, though the new approaches will doubtless add to the accessibility of the place, cannot fail to injure somewhat its sylvan beauty; just as the building of the palace itself, and especially of the new annexe now in course of construction, further dwarfs and hides the quaint little monastery, which really seems to strike the note harmonious with the place.