Alcobaça Monastery

The Monastery of Santa Maria at Alcobaça is the largest church in Portugal and one of the purest works of Cistercian Gothic in Europe. The first king of Portugal, Afonso Henriques, gave the land to Bernard of Clairvaux in 1153, after taking Santarém from the Moors, as part of his strategy of settling and securing newly conquered territory. Construction of the stone monastery began in 1178, the monks moved in in 1223 and the church was consecrated in 1252. By around 1300 Alcobaça was the richest and most powerful monastery in the kingdom, with a large community of monks and vast estates.

The church follows the model of Clairvaux, the mother house in France, and it is overwhelming in its simplicity. The nave runs about 106 metres long but only about 17 metres wide, with side aisles as tall as the central one, some 20 metres, so that the interior becomes a forest of plain, pale columns rising to the vaults, lit by rows of windows. Cistercian rule forbade decoration, and the walls are almost bare; the effect is of height, proportion and light. The main façade is later, with baroque towers and statues added in the eighteenth century around the original portal and rose window.

In the transept lie the most famous tombs in Portugal. King Pedro I, who had loved the noblewoman Inês de Castro, saw her murdered in 1355 on the orders of his father. When he became king, he had her remains brought here and commissioned two magnificent carved Gothic tombs for the pair. The sarcophagi are covered with finely carved scenes, including the life of Christ and the Last Judgement on hers. Other Portuguese kings and queens rest in the royal pantheon nearby.

The monastic buildings are equally memorable. The Cloister of Silence, built under King Dinis in the early fourteenth century, received an upper storey in the Manueline style in the sixteenth. The vast Gothic dormitory, where the monks slept together, and the rib-vaulted refectory survive, and the eighteenth-century kitchen is lined with tiles and dominated by an enormous chimney on iron columns, with a channel diverted from the river Alcoa running through it. The monks left in 1834, and the monastery became a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1989.

Getting there

The monastery is in the centre of the town of Alcobaça, about 120 km north of Lisbon. Rede Expressos buses run from Lisbon's Sete Rios terminal several times a day, taking about two hours, and the Alcobaça bus terminal is roughly a 10-minute walk from the monastery. Lisbon Humberto Delgado Airport (LIS) is about 86 km away in a straight line.