Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Architectural Movements
Great Gothic
Cistercians introduced the Gothic trend, which reached its pinnacle in Alcobaça, in one of
Portugal's most ethereally beautiful buildings. The austere abbey church and cloister of the
Mosteiro de Santa Maria de Alcobaça, begun in 1178, has a lightness and simplicity
strongly influenced by Clairvaux Abbey in France. Its hauntingly simple Cloisters of Si-
lence were a model for later cathedral cloisters at Coimbra, Lisbon, Évora and many other
places. This was the birth of Portuguese Gothic, which flowered and transmuted over the
coming years as the country gained more and more experience of the outside world. For
centuries Portugal had been culturally dominated and restricted by Spain and the Moors.
By the 14th century, when the Mosteiro de Santa Maria da Vitória (commonly known as
Mosteiro da Batalha or Battle Abbey) was constructed, simplicity was a distant, vague
memory. Portuguese, Irish and French architects worked on this breathtaking monument
for more than two centuries. The combination of their skills and the changing architectural
fashions of the times, from Flamboyant (late) Gothic to Renaissance and then Manueline,
turned the abbey into a seething mass of carving, organic decorations, lofty spaces and
slanting stained-glass light. It's a showcase of High Gothic art. It exults in the decorative
(especially in its Gothic Royal Cloisters and Chapter House), while the flying buttresses tip
their hat to English Perpendicular Gothic.
Secular architecture also enjoyed a Gothic boom, thanks to the need for fortifications
against the Moors and to the castle-building fervour of the 13th-century ruler, Dom Dinis.
Some of Portugal's most spectacular, huddled, thick-walled castles - for example, Estre-
moz, Óbidos and Bragança - date from this time, many featuring massive double-perimeter
walls and an inner square tower.
Portugal has few Renaissance buildings, but some examples of the style are the Great Cloisters in Tomar's
Convento de Cristo, designed by Spanish Diogo de Torralva in the late 16th century; the nearby Igreja de
Nossa Senhora da Conceição; and the Convento de Bom Jesus at Valverde, outside Évora.
Manueline
Manueline is a uniquely Portuguese style: a specific, crazed flavour of late Gothic architec-
ture. Ferociously decorative, it coincided roughly with the reign of Dom Manuel I (r
