Carmo Convent (Convento do Carmo)

Church · ChiadoLisbon,Portugal

A Gothic church in Lisbon with the sky where its roof used to be, the vaults having fallen on the congregation in 1755.

At the Carmo Convent five bays of pointed arches stand free above you, grass grows between the stones of the floor, and the columns still carry the springing of vaults that are not there. The vaults came down on the congregation on the morning of 1 November 1755, when the earthquake struck a city at mass on All Saints' Day. Only the apse at the far end kept its roof, and the museum is in there. The apse is the one covered room left, and stepping into it from the open nave is the whole visit in two paces. Inside is the tomb of King Fernando I, carried here from Santarém after soldiers had used its lid as a water trough for horses. Around it stand Roman inscriptions, stone tools from the walled village at Vila Nova de São Pedro, an Egyptian sarcophagus and two Peruvian mummies. The archaeologists given the ruin in 1864 have been adding to it ever since.

Worth knowing

Good to know

Check which day you go — this museum closes on Sundays rather than Mondays, the opposite of most of the city, so people climb the hill for nothing every week.
Rain changes the whole visit — the nave has no roof, so a wet day leaves you looking at the collection in the apse and hurrying through the part you came for.
Late afternoon is the best hour in the nave — low sun comes sideways through the arches and puts the columns in relief; at midday the light is flat and the stone goes grey.
Come up by the Santa Justa walkway or the Chiado streets — the square sits above the Baixa and every approach is a climb, worth knowing before you plan a long day around it.

Things to do

1
Stand in the nave, then look at the broken columns
Walk to the middle of the nave and stop: five bays of pointed arches stand open to the sky above you, with nothing between them and the weather. Then go along the arcade and look at the tops of the columns, where the stone breaks off short. Those broken ends are the surfaces the fall left, at eye level and never repaired.
2
Go into the apse, the one part still covered
At the far end the vault survived, and that covered space now holds the museum collection: medieval tombs, Roman inscriptions, tiles, and two Peruvian mummies in a case. Walking from the open nave into this low roofed room shows how much of the church is gone.