Chapter One: The Oval on the Hill

Around a large oval stone structure in the landscape of Monte Pocilgais, we intend to explore the genius loci of the place, its psychogeography, and the first steps toward a conscious landscape practice.

This is more than tree-bathing, and more than landscape architecture. It is an attempt to enter a psycho-emotional landscape ecology: a way of listening to stone, slope, wind, cicadas, birds, memory, and perception, all as interwoven dimensions of place.

On Monte Pocilgais, in the hills above the eastern Algarve, we found something that refuses to behave like ordinary landscape. Nearly every friend who has sat here with me has experienced deep relaxation and a quality of atmosphere that can only be called magical. That consistency is reason enough to look more carefully at the relationship between landscape, emotion, and the spiritual dimension of place.

The structure is an oval formation, approximately fifty metres long and twenty metres wide, lying on a mild south-facing slope about fifty metres north of the valley river. The difference in height between the formation and the riverbed is only about three metres. The whole complex lies broadly on an east-west axis, inclining roughly ten degrees from north to south, the northern side being higher, and five degrees from east to west, with the eastern side higher.

The formation consists of around twenty large grey stones that differ strikingly from the surrounding geology. The hill itself is made of softer reddish sedimentary rock, visibly layered and friable. The stones of the oval are grey, considerably harder, and appear materially foreign to the immediate hillside. The largest stand approximately three metres high and two metres broad. They are closely adjacent, in places layered both vertically and horizontally, some resting upon or against others. Between them grow old carob trees and stone oaks, whose roots now bind the vegetal and lithic structure into a single living complex. Until recently, creeper plants had obscured the entire formation; after their removal, a possible west-east passage between the stones became visible.

At this stage, no archaeological claim should be made. The structure may be natural, agricultural, pastoral, or deliberately constructed, ancient, recent, or a layering of several histories. The grey stones may have been transported, exposed by erosion, reused from another context, or brought for rural purposes now forgotten. The first task is therefore not interpretation but documentation.

Yet even before interpretation, the place exerts a presence.

It has form. It has orientation. It has a boundary. It has an interior. It has a passage. It has old trees rooted into stone. In the winter it stands close to water but above the riverbed. It contrasts with the local bedrock. It invites walking. It invites return. It invites sitting. Even some stones seem to be chairs.

This is why the site can be approached not only as a possible archaeological feature, but also as a genius loci, a spirit or character of place.

Chapter Two: Genius Loci and the Double Nature of Place

Marilena Vecco’s article “Genius loci as a meta-concept” offers a useful scholarly vocabulary for what is otherwise difficult to describe. Genius loci, in this approach, is not simply a romantic notion that a place has a “spirit.” It is the intangible quality of a material place, perceived physically, emotionally, culturally, and sometimes spiritually. A place is never only stone, soil, trees, slope, and water. It is also atmosphere, memory, orientation, use, perception, and interpretation.

Vecco distinguishes between tangible and intangible values, which she calls hard and soft. The hard values are the visible, physical elements: stones, trees, paths, river, slope, geological layers, walls, ruins, and measurable form. The soft values are less visible but no less real: atmosphere, memory, symbolic charge, affect, felt boundary, orientation, local meaning, and the way a place speaks to those who enter it. The genius loci arises through the interaction of both.

This framework applies directly to the Pocilgais oval, which is precisely such an interaction. Its hard values are clear enough to document: dimensions, orientation, slope, stone type, tree species, relation to the aquafer, and possible passage. Its soft values are only beginning to emerge: the felt difference between inside and outside, the sense of directionality from west to east, the way the old carob trees hold the stones, the contrast between grey hard stone and red sedimentary hill, the proximity in the winter of water, and the quiet impression that the place is more organised than its surroundings.

Vecco also argues that genius loci is layered. A place contains a visible material layer, an invisible experiential layer created in human perception, and underlying processes of human and natural activity. This threefold structure offers a working model for Monte Pocilgais.

The visible layer is the oval itself: stone, tree, slope, passage, river, and geology.

The invisible layer is what is perceived there: presence, boundary, enclosure, silence, attention, and the possible emergence of imaginal form.

The underlying process includes everything that made and remade the place: geology, erosion, tree growth, agricultural history, possible human arrangement, animal movement, water flow in the winter, forgotten use, the ancient walls of little stones at the south-side in between the big ones, and the slow entanglement of roots and stone.

The Pocilgais oval should therefore not be approached as a dead object. It is a living place, a field of relationships, a site where material and immaterial values meet.

Chapter Three: Taxonomy of What We Want to Do

Where this project connects to serious landscape work is through several overlapping fields, each of which contributes something the others lack.

Ecological and regenerative landscape design asks how landscapes can be cared for as living systems, enhancing biodiversity, water flow, soil, habitat, and human well-being. Recent literature in this field explicitly frames landscape work as moving beyond maintenance toward the active enhancement of both ecosystem and human flourishing.

Environmental psychology studies the transactions between people and their physical environments. It asks how space, form, vegetation, enclosure, paths, and sensory qualities affect perception, behaviour, stress, restoration, and well-being, drawing on psychology, sociology, geography, and design in equal measure.

Therapeutic and healing landscape studies is perhaps the closest disciplinary neighbour to this project. It asks how the cultural and natural construction we call landscape affects physical, emotional, mental, social, and sometimes spiritual health. Recent work in this field identifies ecological environment, spatial organisation, sensory experience, and social interaction as the key design elements of a healing place.

Landscape phenomenology is the most precise academic cousin of what we are attempting here. It studies how landscapes are experienced through body, movement, paths, stones, orientation, memory, and perception. Christopher Tilley’s A Phenomenology of Landscape: Places, Paths and Movements and The Materiality of Stone are the classic references, widely cited in both heritage studies and landscape research.

Genius loci studies offers the most elegant bridge between landscape practice and the soul of a place. As Vecco argues, genius loci is the intangible quality of a material place, perceived physically and spiritually, and made visible through the interplay of hard features, stones, trees, slope, river, and geology, and soft features, atmosphere, attention, boundary, memory, and imaginal form.

Psychogeography provides another legitimate frame, though it originated in urban Situationist practice. In its contemporary form it is used more broadly for embodied walking, drifting, mapping, and recording how places affect emotion, perception, identity, and behaviour. A recent definition describes it as a research method based on embodied drifting through place, followed by documentation and creative cartography.

The Magickal Landscape rising in the UltraSubjective Hyperspace

Where the project enters esotericism is through the work of Andrew Chumbley. Patterson and Howard describe Chumbley’s late practice as focused on landscape, walking, spirit contact, genius loci, omens, trance, and sigil reception, combining history, textual analysis, practitioner memory, phenomenology, and direct engagement with sites into a single hybrid method. That combination is a recognisable methodological ancestor of what we are doing at Monte Pocilgais.

This brings us to a concept developed within our own research on esoteric psychology: the ultra-subjective hyperspace, or USH. The USH is the infinite phenomenal interior space in which the practitioner’s projections, intentions, and perceptions take form, the space in which inner work becomes structurally operative. It is the locus where the soft values of a place, atmosphere, boundary, presence, imaginal form, are not merely registered but generated. When we sit inside the stone circle at Pocilgais and something happens, something that resists reduction to relaxation or suggestion, that something occurs in the USH. The stone circle does not produce the experience. It invites the USH to open fueled by our intention.

This brings the project into contact with one of the most important concepts in the philosophy of religion: Henry Corbin’s (1903–1978) mundus imaginalis, the imaginal world.

For Corbin, the mundus imaginalis is a third realm, neither wholly physical nor wholly ethereal, occupying the liminal space between sensory reality and pure intellect, between this world and the Otherworld. It is real, but not material. It is imaginal, but not imaginary. Corbin described it as the realm in which visions, and sacred encounters take place, a world with its own geography, its own figures, and its own laws. What Eliade called hierophany (appearance of the sacred).

The resemblance to the USH is not coincidental. Both are liminal interior spaces where perception and reality interpenetrate. But the USH framework introduces a further precision: the Otherworld is not accessed through this space as if it lay on the far side of a threshold. It is generated within it. The genius loci of Monte Pocilgais, the presence felt by those who sit inside the oval, the sense of an organised intention in stone and tree and slope, these are not signals received from elsewhere. They are formations arising in the USH, real in the only sense that matters for a phenomenology of place: they are experienced, they persist, and they act.

So what is it?

So is this a real thing? Yes, though not under any single discipline. The formal academic umbrellas would be landscape architecture if the aim is design and land-care; ecological landscape design if the aim is biodiversity, water, soil, and sustainability; environmental psychology if the aim is how place affects mind, body, and emotion; therapeutic landscape studies if the aim is healing and restoration; landscape phenomenology if the aim is embodied perception of stone, path, slope, and orientation; cultural geography and psychogeography if the aim is walking, mapping, memory, and symbolic landscape; and esotericism studies if the aim is spirit of place, ritual, omens, trance, sigil, and imaginal perception.

Our project draws on all of these. Its best working name might be phenomenological landscape practice, or genius loci-based ecological landscape practice, or, more specific to the esoteric dimension, esoteric landscape phenomenology. For now, psycho-ecological landscape practice captures the breadth well enough to travel.

landscape architecture, if the aim is design and land-care
ecological landscape design, if the aim is biodiversity, water, soil, habitat, and sustainability
environmental psychology, if the aim is how place affects mind, body, emotion, and behaviour
therapeutic landscape studies, if the aim is healing, restoration, and well-being
landscape phenomenology, if the aim is embodied perception of stone, path, slope, orientation, and place
cultural geography / psychogeography, if the aim is walking, mapping, memory, emotion, and symbolic landscape
esotericism studies, if the aim is spirit of place, ritual, omens, trance, sigil, imaginal perception, and magical practice

Some of our project’s names could be:

phenomenological landscape practice

or:

genius loci-based ecological landscape practice

or, more specific to our work:

esoteric landscape phenomenology

or…

psycho-ecological landscape practice

This is the first part of 4 articles on genius loci-based ecological landscape practice

References

Patterson, S., & Howard, J. (2024). To reveal the hidden kingdom of Eld: Andrew Chumbley, the Cultus Sabbati, and imaginal space in Cornwall. Praxis-Knowledge, 1, 1–19. https://doi.org/10.61149/QNQT7324

Vecco, M. (2020). Genius loci as a meta-concept. Journal of Cultural Heritage, 41, 225–231. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.culher.2019.07.001