Alcobaça Monastery

Overview

The Monastery of Alcobaça is the Cistercian abbey that Afonso Henriques gave to Bernard of Clairvaux in 1153 after taking Santarém from the Moors, built between 1178 and 1252 as the first Gothic building in Portugal and still the largest church in the country, 106 m long. By 1300 it was the richest and most powerful monastery in the kingdom, with nearly a thousand monks and estates, fisheries and trade; it closed in 1834 and was listed by UNESCO in 1989.

It is worth the trip, 120 km north of Lisbon and an hour from Coimbra, for the bare Cistercian nave, the Cloister of Silence, and above all the pair of Gothic tombs in the transept: Pedro I and Inês de Castro, the murdered lover he had crowned after her death, facing each other so that, the story goes, they will see each other first at the resurrection.

History

The first monks lived in wooden huts from 1153; construction began in 1178 to the plan of Clairvaux, the monks moved in in 1223 and the church was consecrated in 1252, the largest in Portugal. King Dinis added the Gothic cloister, the Claustro do Silêncio, in the late 13th century. The abbey ran a scriptorium that produced an early history of the country, opened a public school in 1269 and held one of the great medieval libraries, pillaged by the French in 1810 and looted again in the anti-clerical riot of 1834; what survives is in the National Library in Lisbon.

Kings Afonso II and Afonso III and their queens were buried here in the 13th century, and Pedro I, crowned in 1357, commissioned the tombs for himself and Inês de Castro, murdered on his father’s orders in 1355. Manuel I added an upper storey to the cloister and a new sacristy in the Manueline style; the 18th century added a second cloister, the towers and the statues on the facade, and the monks became known for clay sculpture. The 1755 earthquake did little harm, the French troops of the Peninsular War robbed the tombs and burned part of the interior, and the last monks left in 1834.

Visiting

The facade on the town square mixes periods: the portal and rose window are original, the statues and twin towers early 18th-century, and the plain wings either side are the monastery. Inside, the church is a Latin cross with three aisles of equal height, 20 m, only 17 m wide and 106 m long, with no decoration on column or wall as the Cistercians required, lit by rows of windows and three rose windows; the main chapel has an ambulatory and radiating chapels on the Clairvaux model.

The tombs are in the transept. Pedro’s rests on lions and Inês’s on half-human beasts, each with a recumbent figure attended by angels; the sides of his carry the life of St Bartholomew and scenes from the couple’s story, hers the life of Christ with the Crucifixion and the Last Judgement. They are anonymous and among the best Gothic sculpture in the country. The chapel of St Bernard in the south transept has the 17th-century clay group of the saint’s death, with Afonso II and Afonso III buried either side; off the right transept the Royal Pantheon, a neo-Gothic room of the late 18th century and the earliest neo-Gothic in Portugal, holds the tombs of Queens Urraca, who died in 1220, in a rich late-Romanesque tomb, and Beatriz. The Cloister of Silence, the chapter house, the dormitory and the monks’ kitchen with its great chimney complete the route.

Tips

• Go into the church first and the tombs last; the cloister and kitchen are the ticketed part and the church is free.
• The tombs are best seen with the transept windows behind you in the morning.
• Alcobaça town is small; the pastry shops opposite the abbey sell the conventual sweets the monks made famous, and the lunch stop is here rather than in Batalha.
• Batalha is 20 minutes north and Nazaré 15 minutes west; the three make one day from Lisbon or Coimbra by car, and Alcobaça is 120 km from Lisbon.

Nearby

• Batalha Monastery: 20 km north, 20 minutes by car.
• Nazaré: 13 km west.
• Óbidos: 35 km south.
• Fátima: 35 km east.