Sanctuary of Bom Jesus do Monte
Santuário do Bom Jesus do Monte
- UNESCO World Heritage
Interesting facts
- Each fountain of the Five Senses stairway shows a figure spouting water from the relevant organ: from the eyes, the ears, the nose and the mouth.
- The fountain of Touch is flanked by the blind patriarch Isaac, carved with arms outstretched as he gropes for his son.
- On the fountain of Charity, water springs from the heart of a child held in the arms of a woman.
- The funicular beside the stairs was engineered to a design by the Swiss pioneer Niklaus Riggenbach, whose specifications reportedly arrived in Braga by post.
- Opened on 25 March 1882, the funicular is regarded as the oldest in the world still running on water counterbalance alone.
- Before the Baroque sanctuary, the hilltop saw a succession of small hermitages, recorded in 1373, 1494 and 1522, each rebuilding the devotion of the last.
- The churchyard laid out by Carlos Amarante is ringed by eight statues of the figures who took part in the condemnation and death of Christ.
- The park holds a pavilion by André Soares, moved from the archbishop's gardens in 1919, which Reynaldo dos Santos ranked among Portugal's most fantastic buildings.
- The water-driven funicular takes between two and a half and four minutes for its run, depending on how many passengers are aboard.
Why it is worth it
Above Braga, on a wooded hill at Tenões, a monumental staircase zigzags up through the trees for 116 metres to a church at the top. Bom Jesus do Monte is less a church than a climb turned into architecture: a Baroque Via Sacra in which the pilgrim's ascent is the whole point. It was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2019, and its design was copied from Lamego in Portugal to Congonhas in Brazil.
The hill had a chapel of the Holy Cross by 1373, but the present sanctuary began in 1722 under Archbishop Rodrigo de Moura Telles, whose arms are carved over the gateway at the bottom. The lower flights are lined with chapels holding terracotta tableaux of the Passion. Then comes the famous zigzag of the Five Senses, where each sense has its own fountain, followed in the 1780s by a third flight dedicated to Faith, Hope and Charity, again with fountains. Together they add up to 583 steps. Water runs from the stone figures all the way up, and the idea is purification: the senses of the body at the bottom, the virtues of the soul nearer the top. Tradition had pilgrims make the climb on their knees.
At the summit stands the church by Carlos Amarante, begun in 1784, consecrated in 1834 and among the earliest Neoclassical churches in Portugal; since 2015 it has been a minor basilica. Behind it, octagonal chapels from the 1760s, attributed to André Soares, and fountains of the four Evangelists fill the Terreiro dos Evangelistas. Those who do not want to walk can take the funicular that has run beside the stairs since 1882, the first in the Iberian Peninsula and still driven by water counterbalance: the upper car fills its tank with water and its weight pulls the lower one up.
Getting there
The sanctuary is about 3 km from the edge of Braga, above the Bairro Novo district. City bus line 2 runs from Avenida da Liberdade in central Braga to the foot of the stairs in about 20–25 minutes. The nearest airport is Francisco Sá Carneiro in Porto (OPO), about 43 km away.
On these lists
From the encyclopaedia
The Sanctuary of Bom Jesus do Monte is a Portuguese Catholic shrine in Tenões, outside the city of Braga, in northern Portugal. Its name means Good Jesus of the Mount.
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