Jerónimos Monastery

Church · BelémLisbon,Portugal

A Lisbon monastery paid for by a tax on the spice trade, its palm-like vault and carved cloister covered in ropes and sea monsters.

The Jerónimos Monastery, on UNESCO's list since 1983 with the Belém Tower down the shore, has its cloister as the reason to come. Two storeys of stone tracery run around a square courtyard, and almost no two arches are carved alike, so an hour spent walking it slowly is the right way to use the building. In the church, columns rise like palms and fan into a single vault so wide it has no visible support at the centre. That vault stood through the earthquake of 1755 while most of the lower city fell. Ropes, knots, coral, sea monsters and armillary spheres are carved all over the pale Lioz limestone, so the economy that paid for the monastery is spelled out across its walls. Manuel I ordered it in 1501 and paid for it with the vintena da pimenta, a five per cent duty on commerce from Africa and the East. It stands where Vasco da Gama and his crew spent the night before sailing in 1497, and he lies in a tomb inside the west door, opposite the poet Camões. Both tombs were installed in the nineteenth century, and whose bones are in them is doubted.

Worth knowing

Good to know

Both famous tombs are nineteenth-century — da Gama and Camões were installed here in 1880, and whether the remains are theirs has never been settled.
Morning gets the cloister — the upper gallery takes early sun on the carving, and by afternoon half the square is in its own shadow.
The church is free, the cloister is the ticket — the queue is at the cloister door, the two doors move at completely different speeds, and the whole monastery shuts on Mondays.

Things to do

1
Walk the cloister twice
Go round once at normal pace to see the shape of it, then again slowly along the lower gallery. The tracery changes panel by panel — ropes, plants, animals, instruments — and the second circuit is when you start noticing that the carvers were competing with each other.
2
Look up at the vault that spans with no central pier
In the church, put yourself at the centre of the transept and look up. The vault spans the whole width without a pier in the middle, held by a net of ribs that reads as decoration and is doing the structural work. It is the reason the church survived the earthquake.
3
Open the door to the refectory
Off the cloister, one long vaulted room is lined to the ceiling in tiles laid in the 1780s. The miracle of the loaves and fishes fills the end wall, and the story of Joseph in Egypt runs the length of both sides in blue, yellow and green. It is the only room in the monastery that is a single unbroken picture, and most visitors walk the cloister and leave without finding it.