The man who faked his own death in a sea cave
Boca do Inferno, a sea chasm in Cascais, Portugal, is where occultist Aleister Crowley staged his own disappearance in October 1930, leaving a suicide note before resurfacing weeks later in Berlin. The cliffs around it have also drawn genuine deaths, and the same limestone chasm was filmed in 1896, one of cinema's earliest recorded caves.
Crowley staged his own death at Boca do Inferno
The sea does not pause at Boca do Inferno. It reaches the deep bottom of the chasm. It strikes the rock walls without stopping, day and night. This is why people have always come to stare into it. In October 1930, one visitor used that violence to disappear.
Aleister Crowley was already notorious, an occultist the British press called the wickedest man in the world. He came to Cascais with his lover, Hanni Jaeger, and staged a scene at the cliff edge above the chasm. He left behind a suicide note. Then he walked away and let the world believe the sea had taken him.
It worked, for a while. Newspapers ran his obituary. Crowley resurfaced weeks later in Berlin, very much alive, and let the hoax collapse on its own. The chasm is a short walk from the coastal road. It kept doing what it had always done: grinding at limestone. The limestone dissolves slowly under rain and surf. This widened a cavity. It may once have been a closed cave before its roof fell in.
The chasm has also claimed lives in earnest
Not everyone who came to the edge of Boca do Inferno was performing. The same cliffs that made Crowley's vanishing believable have drawn people whose deaths were not staged. It is described, in the plainest terms available, as a place shadowed by suicides carried out on its unprotected, dangerous cliff face.
The chasm has kept a second, quieter reputation ever since Crowley left it. It is a place for looking at magnificent sunsets, and it is a place where the ground simply stops. Both things are true of the same rock, thirty feet from a footpath tourists walk every day.
The sea keeps working underneath all of it. Rainwater carrying dissolved carbon dioxide eats at the limestone year after year, the same slow chemistry that hollowed the cave out in the first place. Boca do Inferno gets a little bigger every year it is watched.
Spanish troops beheaded four soldiers at the citadel
Cascais had walls long before Crowley found a way to disappear inside its cliffs. In 1580, Spanish troops loyal to the Duke of Alba marched on the town. They wanted to force a road through to Lisbon. They took the Citadel of Cascais and beheaded four Portuguese soldiers. Their bodies were hung from the citadel walls. Everyone in the town could see them.
It was not theater. Nobody staged this ending and nobody walked away from it weeks later. The Spanish wanted every household in Cascais to see exactly what resistance would cost. The killings worked as intended. The town did not fight back.
A treasure ship sank off Cascais and stayed down
The sea off Cascais has swallowed more than reputations. In 1606, a Portuguese East Indiaman called the Nossa Senhora dos Mártires went down in the waters here. It was loaded with pepper and cargo from India. Nobody faked this sinking and nobody resurfaced in Berlin to laugh about it.
The wreck sat on the seabed for almost four hundred years. Archaeologists finally investigated it in 1994, pulling up what the sea had kept. Where Crowley's disappearance ended in a punchline, the Mártires ended exactly the way it looked like it had. The ship went down, and it stayed down.
An earthquake and tsunami wrecked the citadel
Cascais had survived sieges and shipwrecks. It did not survive the morning of November 1, 1755. An earthquake tore through the Portuguese coast. The tsunami that followed battered the Citadel of Cascais, already weakened by the shaking. Buildings that had stood for centuries came down in hours.
The damage was not staged and it was not gossip in a foreign newspaper. It was stone falling on a town that had no warning. Much of Cascais's older heritage was lost that day. The citadel bore the scars of both the quake and the wave that came after it.
Nobility founded a club on the old parade ground
In 1879, Prince Carlos of Portugal founded the Cascais Sporting Club on the old parade ground next to the citadel. Its members, drawn from the nobility, were known as being "of the Parade." For a while it carried the word Royal in its name.
The Portuguese Republic arrived in 1910 and the club quietly dropped that word. It carried on for decades after, a smaller and smaller version of what it had been. In 1974, the club disbanded for good. Its records now sit in the Cascais Municipal Archives, a short distance from where its members once gathered. The building itself became the Museum of the Sea, Cascais in 1992. It holds relics of the fishing town instead of the nobility that once claimed this ground.
The sea still strikes the rock at Boca do Inferno, indifferent to which of its endings were real.
Every person, building and event in this story opens into its own dig in the app — and it will dig the ground you are standing on instead, wherever that is.