The Mouth of Hell

On the rocky Atlantic coast west of Cascais, near Lisbon, waves have carved cliffside caves and blowholes known as Boca do Inferno, 'the Mouth of Hell,' where the sea crashes into the rock with a roar loud enough to have unsettled sailors and fishermen for centuries. Old coastal folklore held that the caves led to an underworld passage where storms were born and where the souls of drowned sailors could sometimes be heard howling inside the rock on rough nights, making local fishermen reluctant to sail too close after dark. The site's most documented brush with the supernatural, though, is real history dressed as legend: in 1930, the British occultist Aleister Crowley staged his own disappearance here with his lover Hanni Jaeger, leaving a note suggesting he had leapt to his death because he 'could not live without her' and that 'the other Boca do Inferno would be merciful,' a line the Portuguese press reported at the time. Crowley reappeared weeks later in Berlin, revealing the vanishing as a publicity stunt, but the episode fused so thoroughly with the site's older, darker reputation that it is still described today as one of Portugal's most haunted stretches of coastline.