Convent of Christ

Interesting facts

A small carved human figure at the foot of the Chapter House window is thought to portray its designer, Diogo de Arruda.

The convent has eight cloisters in all, built over roughly two centuries between the 15th and 17th centuries.

The keep inside Tomar castle is among the oldest in Portugal; the Templars introduced this kind of central residential tower to the country.

The Templars also brought round wall towers to Portugal, a design learned abroad that withstood attack better than the older square towers.

In 1843 King Ferdinand II had the upper storey of the Santa Bárbara cloister pulled down so the Manueline window could be seen properly.

The Charola's Romanesque capitals include a scene of Daniel in the Lions' Den, carved by artists linked to the Old Cathedral of Coimbra.

Gregório Lopes painted a Martyrdom of Saint Sebastian for the round church; the panel now hangs in Lisbon's National Museum of Ancient Art.

The nave once had Manueline choir stalls, destroyed by Napoleonic troops during the Peninsular War in the early 19th century.

One cloister, the Claustro da Micha, was used for baking bread called micha and handing it out to the poor.

Why it is worth it

Tomar is a small city of about 20,000 people on the River Nabão in central Portugal. It grew up beneath the hilltop castle of the Knights Templar, and inside those walls stands the Convent of Christ, one of the key monuments of Portuguese history. The Templars' master in Portugal, Gualdim Pais, fortified the hill around 1160, and in about 1190 the castle held out against the army of the Almohad caliph Abu Yusuf al-Mansur. When the Templar order was dissolved in the early 14th century, King Denis persuaded the pope to create a new Portuguese order to take over its members and property. The Order of Christ was founded in 1319 and made Tomar its seat in 1357. Under the leadership of Prince Henry the Navigator, the order helped finance the voyages that opened Portugal's seaborne empire. The castle and convent were inscribed as a World Heritage Site in 1983.

The oldest and most striking building is the Charola, the Templars' round church of the late 12th century. From outside it is a sixteen-sided fortress-like drum with buttresses and round windows; inside, an octagonal core is ringed by an ambulatory, a plan modelled on round buildings in Jerusalem such as the Holy Sepulchre. From 1499 King Manuel I had it covered in late Gothic decoration: polychrome statues of saints and angels under elaborate canopies by the sculptors Olivier de Gand and Hernán Muñoz, and wall paintings from the workshop of the court painter Jorge Afonso.

From 1510 Manuel added a nave to the west in the style later named after him, Manueline, a mix of late Gothic and Renaissance forms. It was the work of Diogo de Arruda and João de Castilho. Its outer walls are encrusted with ropes, coral, knotted cords, armillary spheres and crosses of the Order of Christ. The chapter house window, carved by Arruda between 1510 and 1513, is one of the masterpieces of Manueline art, a frame of carved maritime motifs seen from the Santa Bárbara cloister.

Prince Henry had already added two Gothic cloisters. The grandest, the Cloister of João III, was designed by Diogo de Torralva from 1557 and finished in 1591 by the Italian architect Filippo Terzi; with its classical orders and four spiral corner staircases, it is a key work of Portuguese Mannerism. In 1581 the Portuguese nobility met here to recognise Philip II of Spain as their king. Water came from the Pegões aqueduct, completed in 1614, whose arches still cross the valley.

Getting there

The convent is on the hill above Tomar, about 1 km from the town centre. Trains run from Lisbon, including from Lisboa Oriente, taking about 1 hour 35 minutes to 2 hours. The nearest airport is Lisbon Humberto Delgado (LIS), about 110 km away.

Convent of Christ

Interesting facts

Why it is worth it

Getting there

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