Portugal toasts museum in a wine cellar

SANGALHOS, Portugal — Lewis Carroll would approve. Tim Burton too.

The Alianca Underground Museum is a surreal, subterranean wonderland where visitors are guided along darkened corridors passing the phallic funeral stones of a lost desert civilization; walls crammed with glaring, grimacing African masks; chambers holding the shadowy forms of long-dead sea creatures or startling ceramic statues of gigantic shellfish and wasps the size of sheep.

Opened in April, the museum built into the cellars of one of Portugal’s biggest wine producers is part of the ever expanding artistic empire of billionaire businessman Joe Berardo whose vast and eclectic collection is scattered over a half-dozen locations around the country.

Berardo set Europe’s art world abuzz in 2007 when the major part of his art collection valued at 3.6 billion euros ($4.58 billion) was put on permanent public display in the riverside Belem Cultural Center in Lisbon. The 800 some works from artists such as Picasso, Warhol and Bacon endowed the Portuguese capital with a major new cultural attraction.

Other parts of the Berardo collection are on show in the modern art museum in the leafy highland retreat of Sintra just outside Lisbon; an oriental garden filled with Asian sculpture in the small town of Bomborral north of the capital; and an exhibit of ceramics and African sculpture in a 19th century palace surrounded by tropical gardens on Madeira island, the tycoon’s homeland.

The rural Bairrada region south of Porto has long been renowned throughout Portugal for the quality of its wines and its restaurants specialized in spit-roast suckling pig, but until Berardo decided to make the Alianca winery the site of his latest artistic venture, it hadn’t exactly been a cultural hot spot.

Now visitors are flocking in to see the contrasting variety of art works set among the millions of bottles and barrels of wine and brandy stored in the cool, dark vaults.

The tour begins in a room dedicated to the ancient Bura civilization from what is now Niger in West Africa. Only discovered in 1990s, this ancient people left hundreds of terra cotta funeral jars, many in richly decorated tubular shapes. The museum has around 300 of them dating back over 1,500 years. This sober and mysterious display leads into bright white rooms with walls covered with more modern African art, mostly masks coming from over 80 ethnic groups around the continent, from Mali to Mozambique.

Berardo, 66, made his fortune in South Africa after emigrating in the early 1960s to escape poverty in Madeira. His biography is a remarkable rags-to-riches tale.

The youngest of seven children born to an illiterate wine worker, then named Jose Manuel, Berardo left school at the age of 13. He started in business trading goods with foreign sailors whose ships docked on the island and got a taste of the entrepreneurial world serving tea at board meetings of the Madeira Wine Company where his father was employed.

At 18 he sailed off to seek his fortune travelling first to Mozambique, then a Portuguese colony, and finally South Africa where he found work with a Portuguese trader, eventually becoming a partner in the small business selling fruit and vegetables to the canteens of Johannesburg’s gold mines.

His big break came in the 1970s when he invested in old mines that had been abandoned as uneconomical. Berardo correctly predicted a rise in the gold price and improvements in technology that made it profitable to extract residue gold from piles of waste tailings left over from the mines.

A deal with the South African diamond magnate Harry Oppenheimer brought Berardo his first million and he never looked back, diversifying from mining into banking, tourism, telecoms and wine.

He acted as an advisor to the South African president during the apartheid years and joined the ruling National Party, but his website says he did work within the system to fight against “one of the largest cases of discrimination the world has ever known.”

Berardo confesses to having been a compulsive collector since hording stamps and matchboxes as kid in Madeira.

The Underground Museum holds just some of the 2,500 sculptures from the Tengenenge sculptors’ community in Zimbabwe which Berardo acquired in a single purchase. There is a spectacular assortment of fossils dating back over 20,000 million years and fantastical shaped and colored minerals from Brazil.

Disconcertingly a long murky corridor leads to a brightly lit room filled with the weird and wacky work of Rafael Bordalo Pinheiro, a 19th century artist whose ceramic factory turned out frighteningly realistic sculptures of oversized seafood and bugs.

In a more relaxing mood, backlit translucent pink quartz casts a rosy glow over row upon row of sparkling wine, while there’s a cathedral-like ambiance to the main storeroom stocked with oak barrels holding over 1 million liters of brandy. The shadowy hall is hung with chandeliers and can be rented out for dinner parties.

Tour guide Joana Rodrigues explains that museum aims to appeal to all five senses from the feel of the cool air of the cellars, to the sound of Gregorian chants pumped into the exhibition rooms, the oaky aroma of the wine barrels, the sight of the art and finally the taste of the sparkling wine offered to all visitors at the end of the tour.