Hercules, coming to offer to Ceres the skin of the Nemean Lion, is said to have succumbed to the charm of this site and created a lake. Drained in the 1930s, the lake was recreated, on a smaller scale, at a distance from the villa. The garden that surrounds it today, set out around 1967, contains many Mediterranean species including yuccas, palm trees, jacaranadas, parkinsonias, Judea trees and a plant originally from Tanzania, encephalartos horridus.