Manuel I ordered the Mosteiro dos Jerónimos in 1501 and paid for it with a five per cent tax on commerce from Africa and the East — with the pepper, cinnamon and clove duties reserved to the crown. The result is the clearest example of the Manueline style, the Portuguese version of late Gothic that decorated buildings with the imagery of seafaring and trade. Ropes, knots, coral, artichokes, sea monsters and armillary spheres are carved all over the pale Lioz limestone, so the maritime economy that paid for the monastery is spelled out across its walls. It stands where Vasco da Gama and his crew spent the night before sailing in 1497; he lies in a tomb inside the west door, opposite the poet Camões, though both tombs were installed in the nineteenth century and there is doubt about whose bones are in them.
The cloister is 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.