"What's in a Name?

That which we call a rose by any other word would smell as sweet"

When we first stood on this land in June 2015, cradled by silence and wild beauty, we asked ourselves a simple yet difficult question: What shall we call this place? I

In 2018, our architect, Luís Rebelo de Andrade, along with the builders, had begun referring to it as Matos dos Moinhos—The Mills in the Woods. A name rooted in function, in memory of the roman era here, in the visible remains of the old stone mills. It was a good name. But it did not speak to us fully. It did not whisper of the unseen.

So we began a quiet search. We read. We sifted through drawings, maps, dictionaries, the faint lines of stories once told. We listened. To the murmurs of the river, the sigh of the wind through the chestnut trees. Still, no name came.

Then, one day, I found an old drawing by Luís, it was just a hand sketch from the early days, perhaps 2016 or 2017. On it was a simple notation:  “Tinhela 610 m”. I deciphered it as the elevation in meters of the Tinhela River where it runs through the land. Thus, the river sits at 610 meters above sea level.

I paused.

The number 610 stayed with me. It felt strangely whole, quietly significant.

Later, I remembered why: 610 is part of the Fibonacci sequence*, that ancient and mysterious progression of numbers that reveals itself throughout the natural world, in the unfurling of ferns, the spiral of a pinecone, the swirl of galaxies, the proportions of sacred architecture. A pattern of growth both wild and ordered, spontaneous and eternal.

So here we were with a word and number that tied this land not only to its physical placement on the planet earth, but to a deeper order, to a universal rhythm that the trees, the river, the stones already seemed to know. It felt right.

So we called it Tinhela610.

Since then, we’ve let the sequence guide our hand.

Our stone firepit, a circle for stories, silence, and ceremony, marks the center of a stone terrace that spirals outward following Fibonacci’s curve, just as many sacred sites once did, long before the word "mathematics" was ever spoken.

Our Fibonacci Fire Pit. Sitting around a fire inspires profound human connection.

Even our cabins take part in the spiral: numbered 21, 34, 55, 89, 144, 233, 377. A quiet rhythm for those who pay attention. A gentle invitation to see differently. To notice. To feel.

As Thoreau once wrote, "The world is but a canvas to our imagination."  In choosing this name, we didn’t name the land. We named a way of seeing it.

*Watch here: a video on the Fibonnaci Sequence.