Carmo Convent, Lisbon

High above Lisbon's lower town, the church of the Carmo Convent stands open to the sky. Its nave has no roof, only a line of tall pointed arches springing between the pillars and framing clouds, pigeons and the evening light where vaults once were. It is the most eloquent surviving witness of the earthquake of 1755, left deliberately as a ruin, and one of the strangest and most moving Gothic spaces in Europe.

The convent was founded in 1389 by Nuno Álvares Pereira, the Constable of Portugal and commander of King John I's armies, for the Carmelite friars, on land acquired from his sister. Built between 1389 and 1423, it followed the plain, lofty Gothic favoured by the mendicant orders, and it became the principal Gothic church of the capital, rivalling the cathedral in scale; in 1423 the constable himself entered the convent as a friar. On 1 November 1755 the great earthquake brought down the stone roof of the nave and destroyed the library of some 5,000 volumes, and the community of more than a hundred clergy had to abandon the building. Later rebuilding was never completed, and the nave was left as it fell.

Since 1864 the ruin has belonged to the Association of Portuguese Archaeologists, which turned it into the Carmo Archaeological Museum. The collection is small but unexpected, ranging from Roman and Visigothic stones to Gothic tombs and even two Peruvian mummies. Among its treasures is the elaborately carved tomb of King Ferdinand I, who reigned from 1367 to 1383, and a statue of a 12th-century king sometimes identified as Afonso Henriques. The contrast is the point of a visit: sculpted tombs under a vault, then a step out into the nave and nothing overhead but sky.

The little square outside, Largo do Carmo, has its own place in Portuguese history. On 25 April 1974, during the Carnation Revolution, rebel soldiers besieged the former convent buildings, used as military barracks since 1836, where the head of the government, Marcelo Caetano, had taken refuge, and he surrendered there to General António de Spínola, bringing the dictatorship to an end.

Getting there

The Carmo Convent stands on Largo do Carmo in central Lisbon, on the hill overlooking the Rossio and very close to the upper platform of the Santa Justa Lift, which climbs to it from the streets below. Lisbon Humberto Delgado Airport (LIS) is about 8 km away.