São Bento Monastery, Rio de Janeiro — abbey
Halley Pacheco de Oliveira · CC BY-SA 3.0

São Bento Monastery, Rio de Janeiro

Mosteiro de São Bento

  • 1 min read
  • 22.897° S 43.178° W

Interesting facts

  • The hill was donated to the Benedictines in 1586 by Manuel de Brito and his son Diogo de Brito de Lacerda, both later buried in the church.
  • The first plans, drawn in 1617, came from the military engineer Francisco Frias de Mesquita, who designed them in a sober Mannerist style.
  • In 1602 the church was dedicated to Our Lady of Montserrat, in honour of the colonial governor Francisco de Sousa.
  • The stone for the building was quarried at Morro da Viúva, in what is now Rio's Flamengo district.
  • The German-born monk Ricardo do Pilar painted his masterpiece, the Senhor dos Martírios, for the sacristy around 1690.
  • The Benedictine sculptor Frei Domingos da Conceição designed the carved interior and made the statues of Saint Benedict, Saint Scholastica and Our Lady of Montserrat.
  • Mestre Valentim, the leading sculptor of colonial Rio, made the great candelabra near the chancel between 1781 and 1783.
  • The Rococo carver Inácio Ferreira Pinto remodelled the chancel in 1787–1794 and then created the Chapel of the Blessed Sacrament.
  • Its Sunday morning Mass is sung in Gregorian chant with organ, a practice unique among the churches of central Rio.
  • The Colégio de São Bento, founded in 1858, lists composers Heitor Villa-Lobos and Pixinguinha and songwriter Noel Rosa among its former pupils.

Why it is worth it

Benedictine monks arriving from Bahia founded the monastery on a hill above Rio's harbor in 1590. Construction of the church that stands today began in 1633 and was finished in 1671, with an additional annex completed in 1755 — a building campaign that stretched across more than a century.

The monastery's plain, almost fortress-like façade gives no hint of what waits inside: a richly gilded Baroque interior where wood carving covers nearly every surface in gold leaf, one of the most extensive uses of gilding in colonial Brazilian religious architecture.

Between 1676 and 1684 the Benedictine friar Ricardo do Pilar painted a series of panels of Benedictine saints for the church, and his masterpiece, the Senhor dos Martírios, hangs in the sacristy — a rare instance of a monk-artist at work in colonial Brazil.

Unlike most of the abbeys in this collection, São Bento never stopped functioning: the monastic community and its attached school, the Colégio de São Bento, remain active today, making it one of the very few Benedictine houses in the Americas with an unbroken four-century history on the same site.

Getting there

Located in Rio de Janeiro. Santos Dumont Airport (SDU) is about 2 km away.

Plan your visit

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Nearby places

On these lists

The Most Beautiful Places in Rio de Janeiro 12The Most Beautiful Places in Brazil 44The Most Beautiful Sacred Places in Brazil 9The Most Beautiful Abbeys 28The Most Beautiful Sacred Places 623

From the encyclopaedia

The Abbey of Our Lady of Montserrat, more commonly known as the Mosteiro de São Bento (Monastery of St. Benedict), is a Benedictine abbey located on the Morro de São Bento in downtown Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The Mannerist style church is a primary example of Portuguese colonial architecture in Rio and the country.

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