Immerse Yourself in the Sierra Madre Magic

The Sierra Madre Magic refers to the enchanting and mystical qualities surrounding the Sierra Madre mountain range, which stretches across Mexico and parts of the United States. This mountain range is known for its awe-inspiring natural beauty, rich biodiversity, and folklore. The Sierra Madre mountains are home to various indigenous communities that have lived in harmony with nature for centuries. These communities have developed a deep understanding of the mountains and the spirits that reside within them. One of the most famous stories surrounding the Sierra Madre Magic is the legend of the "Nahual," a shapeshifting creature that can take the form of a human or an animal. It is believed that some people possess the ability to transform into a Nahual, allowing them to communicate with animals and harness their powers.

That mold might have had a hand in the earl’s death — or any others — is speculative. Researchers have argued for and against the idea for years. Without conclusive evidence, it will remain just a theory.

According to National Geographic, these strains can cause various allergic reactions, ranging from chest congestion to pulmonary hemorrhaging, or bleeding in the lungs. Sudden deaths, grievous misfortune and other inexplicable events gave rise to speculation that an evil spell was afflicting any who had dared defile the pharaoh s final resting place.

It is believed that some people possess the ability to transform into a Nahual, allowing them to communicate with animals and harness their powers. The Sierra Madre Magic is also associated with healing and spiritual practices. Many traditional healers, known as "curanderos," reside in the mountain villages and use natural herbs, plants, and rituals to heal ailments and restore balance to the body and spirit.

Under the spell of Highclere Castle and ‘Downton Abbey’

The Spitfire Sisters--Louisa Revolta, left, and Anna Harding-- perform classics from the ‘30s and ‘40s at the door to the Highclere library, where Hugh Bonneville, the fictional Earl of Grantham in the “Downton Abbey” series, often has serious discussion with members of the Crawley family. (Catharine Hamm / Los Angeles Times)

Lady Fiona Carnarvon discusses her newest book, “Lady Catherine, the Earl and the Real Downton Abbey” which follows “Lady Almina and the Real Downton Abbey.” Both focus on the countesses who presided over Highclere until death (Almina) or divorce (Catherine). (Catharine Hamm / Los Angeles Times)

Relaxing between scenes are “Downton Abbey’s” Dan Stevens, left, Hugh Bonneville and Allen Leech. (Matthew Lloyd / For The Times)

Laura Carmichael, who plays Lady Edith Crawley on “Downton Abbey,” goes over the script. (Matthew Lloyd / For The Times)

The town of Newbury, England, has a Main Street, USA quality to it -- clean, quiet and neat. (Catharine Hamm / Los Angeles Times)

A bookstore in Newbury displays “Lady Catherine and the Real Downton Abbey,” by the Countess of Carnarvon. (Catharine Hamm / Los Angeles Times)

A room at the White Hart Inn.

FOR THE RECORD: An earlier version of this caption identified this image as from the Vineyard hotel. (Catharine Hamm / Los Angeles Times)

The chef writes the specials on a chalkboard at the White Hart Inn. (Catharine Hamm / Los Angeles Times)

A grand suite at the Vineyard in Stockcross, Newbury. The elegant 49-room hotel’s emphasis on wine feels like a little bit of California in England.

FOR THE RECORD: An earlier version of this caption identified this image as showing the White Hart Inn. (Catharine Hamm / Los Angeles Times)

The Lion Pub in Newbury, run by Tony Sellers and his wife, Sarah Peterson. The cuisine recently switched from barbecue to Thai, available Thursdays through Sundays. (Catharine Hamm / Los Angeles Times)

NEWBURY, England — He is a farmer, she says, and she is a farmer’s wife. They are active in their community. She writes a bit on the side, her writing room only recently having been wired for electricity.

On my recent visit to her home, she was warm and welcoming. Her yellow Lab, Bella, followed her closely as her mistress ushered visitors into the house.

And oh my. What a house. Two hundred rooms. Forty bedrooms. Silk wallcoverings in one room, 16th century Spanish leather wallcoverings in another. An original Van Dyck. A display on Egyptology, in honor of one of the previous occupants who just happened to have discovered King Tut’s tomb.

Hundreds of other treasures make it abundantly clear that you are not in Kansas anymore.

You are, instead, on the set of “Downton Abbey,” but it’s not a set at all. It is Highclere Castle, and when Season 4 begins Sunday for American viewers of the wildly popular PBS show, it is this magnificent home they will see, outside and partly inside too.

The farmer’s wife, as she called herself — the Countess of Carnarvon — has tried hard to keep it a home, she says, rather than a museum, although she and her husband, the Eighth Earl of Carnarvon and their son live elsewhere.

But Highclere isn’t exactly a home, at least, not the way we might think of one. I may display pictures of my godmother in my home, but she is not Queen Elizabeth II, the current earl’s godmother whose photo is on display. I have a desk, but it didn’t belong to Napoleon Bonaparte. My dishes are not Meissen china.

To be at Highclere, as I was in October with a group of foreign reporters, is to be caught in the spell of the fairy-tale story of the castle that gave rise to “Downton Abbey.” The enchantment stretches beyond the 5,000 acres of the estate, where sheep graze on the green hills and wheat, oats and other crops are grown, to the quaint town of Newbury and maybe, I hoped, to the promise of a Hollywood-style tidbit to tantalize friends and fans at home.

A cab deposited me and my sister at the White Hart Inn in Hamstead Marshall, about four miles from Newbury. The family room where we dropped our bags was up a set of creaking steps in a converted carriage house — plenty of room to stretch out (a double and single bed), a minty-green color scheme and, best of all, a bath in which you didn’t have to hold your breath to move around.

Back in the lobby/pub/restaurant, we quizzed manager Richard Huxtable about all things “Downton.” He isn’t a follower.

“It’s a period drama,” he said, though I wasn’t sure whether it was the period (perhaps too modern for the manager of a 16th century inn) or the drama (perhaps Lady Edith does go on a bit much) that he disdained.

Paul Westbrook doesn’t watch it either, which also disappointed me because his car service often transports the “Downton” actors. He drove us several places, and we expected some gossipy bits about the cast. They are “lovely” people, he says — Maggie Smith, who plays the acid-tongued dowager countess of Grantham; Elizabeth McGovern, the American-born countess of Grantham; her TV spouse, Hugh Bonneville, the earl; and Shirley MacLaine, the American mother of the countess.

Did I sense some classism here? There was, after all, no mention of the help. Nothing of Lesley Nicol (Mrs. Patmore, the cook) or Phyllis Logan (Mrs. Hughes) or Rob James-Collier (the maybe mellowing Thomas). But no, it’s because the downstairs scenes involving the help are shot not at Highclere but at Ealing Studios in London.

The most revealing thing Westbrook would say was that at least one cast member enjoys a nip after work.

At last, but my glee was short-lived. Pub culture in Britain is so ingrained that, upon reflection, I realized this was hardly a stinging indictment.

Just to be sure, we stopped at the Lion, a Newbury pub, hoping for a bit of dirt. We certainly didn’t find it here, not literally and not figuratively. The Lion, like the rest of Newbury, has a Main Street U.S.A. quality about it. Among the shops, flower baskets, trailing bits of greenery, hang from the walls. The traffic along the main drag is controlled by bollards, posts that can be raised or lowered, and on that day, nary a car buzzed by. It was all very quiet, very pretty and a tad unnerving.

Undaunted, I thought I could pry some juicy detail from Tony Sellers, the co-owner of the Lion.

Not a chance. He doesn’t watch “Downton” either and said he wouldn’t know a cast member if he saw one, which he was pretty sure he hadn’t. Steve Lane, who was then running the restaurant at the Lion, was no help. Not a member of “Downton” Nation and, like Sellers, too kind for scurrilous chatter.

Curses. Where was the damaging drama?

We found drama but not the damaging kind at the Watermill West Berkshire Playhouse (www.watermill.org.uk), where we caught a production of “Sherlock’s Last Case.” The plays at the Watermill, which derives its name from its onetime occupation, are widely praised; the Daily Telegraph called this production “as strange and satisfying as a trompe-l’oeil.” Christopher Godwin as Sherlock Holmes and Adam Kotz as Watson were pitch perfect, and, as my ever-wise sibling noted, “The English accents weren’t fake.”

The playhouse’s setting matched the gentleness of the countryside: swans on the nearby creek and ducks and geese strolling the grounds in the gloaming, the slightly musty smell of the building, just right for a bit of theater before seeing the place whose drama drew me in the first place and where, at last, I would find my kiss-and-tell moment.

Countess as greeter

Westbrook picked me up the following morning and drove the five or so miles to Highclere from Hamstead Marshall. As I walked to the front of the castle, 400-year-old cedars of Lebanon to the left, a sign reminding drivers to “stay off the verges” (grassy border) to the right, I saw a woman out front, ready to greet guests. Some sort of retainer, I imagined.

Because, after all, how often do you encounter a countess in the driveway?

Apparently at least once in a lifetime.

Dressed in purple sweater, a black skirt and boots, the Countess of Carnarvon willingly posed for pictures (at one point, she laughingly asked photographers whether they might be oversaturated with photos of her), then led the media past the English bobby at the front door.

Julian Fellowes, the creator, writer and executive producer of “Downton,” is a family friend, and it was Highclere he conjured when he envisioned the series. One glance explains why. The library, where the fictional Crawley family’s serious discussions seem to occur, is as red and gold and glowing as it appears on-screen.

Guide Molly Breakspear took us through the house, each room seemingly grander than the next: the dining room, where 12 leaves can be inserted into the table and 40 people can be seated (“They do seem to spend a good bit of time at the dining table,” she says), down the 150-year-old grand staircase, from which cast members seem to materialize and de-materialize with some frequency; to the bedrooms, where dalliances occur. (Yes, Lady Mary, I am talking about you and the Turk, but we forgave you when you finally realized Matthew was the one for you.)

Some of the real events of Highclere inform the series. Lady Almina, the wife of the fifth earl and the illegitimate daughter of millionaire banker Alfred de Rothschild, turned the house into a hospital during World War I, just as happened on “Downton.”

The constant worry about money and how to keep Highclere/Downton a going concern has played a role in real life and in the alternate universe of the series. Lady Almina brought half a million pounds — about $21 million in today’s money — to her marriage to the fifth earl, George Edward Stanhope Molyneux Herbert. Her money financed his explorations in Egypt, and late in November 1922, he and Howard Carter discovered the entrance that would lead to Tutankhamen’s tomb.

Six months later, he was dead, reinforcing the notion of the curse of Tut.

Castle upkeep

The bigger curse was, perhaps, the death duty, the inheritance tax on the property that fell to the sixth earl to pay. His mother’s fortune was largely gone so priceless artifacts were sold, to his dismay.

Breakspear conveyed all of this — and more — as she shuttled us among the rooms. Not all are used in the series, but if you visit, you will recognize the ones that are because they look largely the same. Some things are put away — that Meissen china, for instance, because, the countess says with a laugh, “I don’t want them to risk [breaking] that, nor do I want to risk them having broken it.”

The film crew is so fastidious “you can’t even tell they’ve been here,” Breakspear says. And that is about as much as she gives away because the volunteers, who range from 16 to 89, are damnably discreet.

The countess was slightly more forthcoming. After the group joined her in the salon of the Spanish leather walls, she settled into a chair as Bella lay at her feet. The questions from the media were scattershot, as varied as Kiri Te Kanawa’s role in Season 4 and the countess’ take on inheritance taxes.

All of it complicated by the castle. Does she ever wish she lived in semi-detached home? “When I married, I think, I didn’t look ahead,” she said. “We’re not given a crystal ball … nor did I realize quite how much work was required. But I like hard work.”

Which is good because she has plenty of it. She and the earl have been steadily repairing when they can, replacing when necessary in a home that dates to 1679 and was reconfigured by Charles Barry, who, fresh from remodeling the houses of Parliament, turned it into Highclere in the mid-1800s.

Amid the pressures of running this confection, the current countess has managed to write two remarkable books, whose historic detail reflects time spent absorbing diaries and letters and other historic documents: “Lady Almina and the Real Downton Abbey,” a 2011 bestseller that focused on the life and times of the Egypt-obsessed earl and the wife who financed his exploits, and “Lady Catherine, the Earl, and the Real Downton Abbey,” published in the U.S. in October, which picks up where “Almina” left off.

There is no dirt on the “Downton” cast and crew from the current countess, who clearly sympathizes with the tedium of filming: “Twelve hours of standing around in curlers for five minutes of film,” she says. But “Downton” is a marvelous marketing tool for Highclere: “Look, you’re all here!” she says with a laugh that frequently honeys her words.

And it’s true. About 60,000 people a year visit from all over the world; tickets (which may include access to the grounds that we didn’t get to explore) are already sold out for the spring.

Finally, amid the talk of the house and the work and the writing, the moment of misbehavior by a cast member look-alike. Bella (who resembles the dog-napped Isis in the series) awakened, trotted up to me, licked my hand, then planted a big wet one on my lips.

Not exactly the scandal I hoped for — but the canine kiss would have to stand in for something more scintillating.

Against the backdrop of this glorious room, the graciousness of the lady of the house and the grandeur of the history, that smooch seemed a right note. Sometimes silly, sometimes serious, “Downton” invites us into a world that we don’t inhabit but we do recognize. Dogs get lost (that was nasty, Thomas), loves are lost and lives are lost. The genius of the show is that we cannot help but care about all of it.

“The more you understand,” the countess says, quoting a German philosopher, “the more you love.”

Until the series ends and for a long time afterward, our hearts will be here.

Finally, amid the talk of the house and the work and the writing, the moment of misbehavior by a cast member look-alike. Bella (who resembles the dog-napped Isis in the series) awakened, trotted up to me, licked my hand, then planted a big wet one on my lips.

These healers are considered to have a deep connection to the Sierra Madre Magic and the spirits that inhabit the mountains. The Sierra Madre Magic has also inspired artists and writers. Its breathtaking landscapes, vibrant wildlife, and the air of mystery surrounding the mountains have been depicted in many paintings, poems, and stories. Unfortunately, the Sierra Madre mountain range has faced numerous challenges, including deforestation, illegal logging, and pollution. These activities endanger the delicate ecosystems and the practices associated with the Sierra Madre Magic. Efforts are being made to conserve and protect this natural treasure and its cultural heritage. In conclusion, the Sierra Madre Magic embodies the spiritual and enchanting qualities of the Sierra Madre mountain range. It encompasses the legends, healing practices, and deep connection to nature that exist within the indigenous communities of the region. It is a reminder of the beauty and power of the natural world and the need to protect and preserve it for future generations..

Reviews for "Get Lost in the Magic of Sierra Madre"

1. Review #1 - John Smith - 1/5 stars:

I was extremely disappointed with "Sierra beea madre magicc". The plot was confusing and poorly executed, resulting in a complete lack of engagement. The characters were underdeveloped and unrelatable, making it difficult to invest in their stories. Additionally, the special effects were unimpressive and failed to create a sense of magic or wonder. Overall, I found this film to be a waste of time and would not recommend it to others.

2. Review #2 - Jane Doe - 2/5 stars:

"Sierra beea madre magicc" promised a unique and enchanting cinematic experience, but it failed to deliver. The storyline felt disjointed and lacked coherence, leaving me confused and disinterested throughout the film. The performances were mediocre at best, and the dialogue was cliché and uninspiring. While some may appreciate the attempt at creating a mystical world, I found it to be contrived and unconvincing. Overall, I was disappointed with this movie and would suggest giving it a pass.

3. Review #3 - Mark Johnson - 1/5 stars:

As a fan of magical and fantasy films, "Sierra beea madre magicc" fell incredibly short of my expectations. The narrative was convoluted and poorly structured, making it difficult to follow or care about the characters. The CGI effects were jarring and unimpressive, often pulling me out of the story instead of immersing me in it. The pacing was also an issue, with long stretches of boredom punctuated by sporadic action that failed to make up for the lackluster screenplay. Overall, I was thoroughly disappointed with this film and would not recommend it to fellow fantasy enthusiasts.

4. Review #4 - Emily Thompson - 2/5 stars:

"Sierra beea madre magicc" tried to capture the magic and wonder of a fantastical world, but it fell flat for me. The plot was predictable and lacked depth, making it difficult to become emotionally invested in the story. The acting was mediocre, and the dialogue felt forced and unnatural. While the cinematography was visually appealing, it was not enough to salvage the film. Unfortunately, I found this movie to be forgettable and unremarkable.

5. Review #5 - Michael Williams - 1/5 stars:

I was truly disappointed with "Sierra beea madre magicc". The storyline was confusing and poorly explained, leaving me puzzled about the motivations of the characters. The pacing was slow, and the movie seemed to drag on without purpose. The special effects were lackluster, and there was a distinct lack of any magical elements that the title promised. Overall, I would not recommend this film to anyone seeking a captivating or enjoyable movie experience.

Unveiling the Secrets of Sierra Madre Magic