Jerónimos Monastery

Vasco da Gama and his crew are said to have spent the night of their departure for India in 1497 praying in a small chapel on the Restelo shore, west of Lisbon. On that spot King Manuel I founded a monastery for the Hieronymite order in 1501, funded by a 5 per cent tax on the profits of trade with Africa and the East, and made it the burial place of his dynasty. The monks' duty was to pray for the king's soul and to comfort the sailors setting out from the nearby harbour. The work took about a century, and the result is the fullest expression of the Manueline style, Portugal's late Gothic, laced with carved ropes, armillary spheres and motifs drawn from the sea voyages and the lands they reached.

The first architect, Diogo de Boitaca, laid out the church and the cloister; the Spaniard Juan de Castillo took over around 1517 and brought in Plateresque ornament, and later Renaissance masters finished it. The south portal, 32 metres high and crowded with carved saints under canopies around a statue of Henry the Navigator, is the famous face of the building, although the real entrance is the smaller west door by Nicolau Chanterene, with kneeling figures of King Manuel and Queen Maria. Inside, the church of Santa Maria is a hall church whose single ribbed vault spans 19 metres, carried on six slender octagonal columns 25 metres high and covered in Renaissance carving. The transept vault has no supports at all and seems to float.

In the lower choir lie the 19th-century tombs of Vasco da Gama and the poet Luís de Camões, whose epic The Lusiads celebrated the voyage; the royal tombs of Manuel I and John III, in the chancel, rest on marble elephants. The two-storey cloister, about 55 metres square, is one of the most beautiful in Europe, its arcades laced with stone tracery and nautical motifs, and in one of them the poet Fernando Pessoa is buried.

The monastery was dissolved in 1833. The west wing, remodelled in the 19th century, now houses the National Archaeology Museum and the Maritime Museum. With the Belém Tower, the monastery was made a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1983; Portugal signed its entry to the European Community in the cloister in 1985, and the Treaty of Lisbon was signed here in 2007.

Getting there

The monastery stands in Belém, on the western side of Lisbon, about 1 km from the district centre. Lisbon Humberto Delgado Airport (LIS) is about 11 km away. Tram 15E from central Lisbon stops at Mosteiro dos Jerónimos, and Belém station on the Cascais railway line from Cais do Sodré is about 750 metres away.