Alcobaca Monastery

Alcobaca was founded in 1153 for the Cistercians and built to their rule: a church of enormous height and almost no ornament, three naves of equal span running back into grey light, with nothing to look at but proportion. The exception stands in the transept, where the tombs of King Pedro and Ines de Castro face each other across the floor, their sides carved in dense Gothic panels. Behind the church the monastic machine survives - the Cloister of Silence, the dormitory, the chapter house, and a kitchen on a scale that still startles, with a chimney the width of a room and a channel of the river diverted straight through the work surface. UNESCO listed it in 1989.

History

Afonso Henriques, the first king of Portugal, founded the monastery in 1153 as a gift to Bernard of Clairvaux after taking Santarém from the Moors in March 1147, part of his plan to settle the lands won in the Reconquista. Building began in 1178, the monks left their wooden houses for it in 1223, and the church, finished in 1252, was then the largest in Portugal and, with the monastery, the earliest truly Gothic architecture in the country; King Denis added the Cloister of Silence in the late 13th century. By 1300 it was the richest and most influential monastery in Portugal, with almost 1,000 monks, a public school from 1269 and one of the largest medieval libraries in the country, and kings Afonso II and Afonso III with their queens, and Peter I with Inês de Castro, were buried here. The French pillaged the library in 1810, and monastic life came to an end in 1834 with the dissolution of the religious orders, when many items were stolen in an anti-clerical riot; the surviving manuscripts are kept in the National Library in Lisbon (Wikipedia, Alcobaça Monastery).

What you'll find

• The nave - three aisles of equal height, stripped of decoration by design.
• The tombs of Pedro and Ines - facing effigies with carved Gothic panels on every side.
• The monks' kitchen - a diverted river channel and a chimney the size of a small room.
• The Cloister of Silence - the 14th-century cloister with an upper storey added later.

When to go

Spring and autumn for comfortable temperatures inside a building that stays cold year round - bring a layer even in July. Mornings are quieter; coach parties doing the Batalha and Fatima circuit arrive late morning. The combined ticket with Batalha and Tomar is worth it if you are doing more than one.

Before you go

The deliberate austerity leaves some visitors cold - there is no colour, no gilding and very little to explain what you are looking at beyond a few panels. The town outside is workaday and the square in front is used as a car park. Sections of the cloister and dormitory close for works without much notice.

Nearby

Batalha's abbey is half an hour east, Nazare's beach twenty minutes west and Obidos further south.

Key facts