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CHURCH OF SÃO VICENTE DE FORA
This huge monastery church was erected at the end of the sixteenth century by the Spanish kings on the site of the twelfth century church built by Afonso Henriques outside the ancient walls of Lisbon. In the Cloister beside the church are fine tiled panels representing the Fables of La Fontaine, and in the Vestibule of the old monastery panels of the taking of Lisbon and Santarem from the Moors. Off the Cloister is the Pantheon of the Bragança kings and queens of Portugal, with the black and white marble tombs of King Carlos and his son, assassinated in the Praça do Comércio in 1908.
TORRE DE BELÉM
Once upon a time this miniature white marble fortress stood on a sandbank in the middle of the Tagus. Built in the early sixteenth century in the Manueline style, it has been furnished and preserved exactly as it was in the days of King Manuel.
MONASTERY CHURCH OF THE JERÓNIMOS
This beautiful white marble church on the banks of the Tagus, built on the profits of the spice trade, is a master-piece of the early sixteenth century Manueline style. It was founded in 1502 by King Manuel I who gave his name to the architectural style of the period. Lining the great nave with its towering columns: are the tombs of the sixteenth century kings of Portugal, including Manuel, and Sebastian, killed fighting the Moors in Marocco in 1578; also of Vasco da Gama, the intrepid navigator who discovered the Cape route to India in 1498, and Luìs de Camões, Portugal`s most famous poet, author of the Lusiads, whose body lies not in this grandiose tomb, but in some unknwn pauper´s grave. The glory of the church is the Cloister, with its fretted marble arches, its rope and buckle motifs, the work of the great Manueline architect, Boytac.
The long galleries to the west of the church are a nineteenth century addition and house an Ethnological Museum. |
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