Alcobaça Monastery
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How it came to be
Afonso Henriques of Portugal took Santarém from the Moors. To reward the Cistercians for their support, in 1153 he gave the land at Alcobaça to Bernard of Clairvaux, and a Cistercian abbey was founded. Building began in 1178, and in 1223 the monks moved from wooden houses into the new monastery.
The church was consecrated in 1252. About 106 metres long, with aisles some 20 metres high, it is still the largest church in Portugal. By about 1300 the abbey had nearly 1,000 monks and was the richest and most powerful in the country. In the transept face the tombs of King Pedro I and Inês de Castro, his lover, murdered in 1355 on the orders of his father Afonso IV. Pedro commissioned both tombs around 1360.
The religious orders were dissolved in 1834 and the last monks left. The monastery was classified as a national monument in 1907 and inscribed in 1989 as a masterpiece of Gothic Cistercian architecture.
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