Rooms of the Monastery of Alcobaça

I probably should not be surprised to know that I would be taking a museum tour of Alcobaça’s monastery. The monastery was one of the most important monasteries in Europe during the monastic age and it was active until the late 1800s. Much of the monastery appears to have been preserved. What I noticed was that there weren’t too many visitors here. It was far from my visions of Portugal being overrun with tourists. There is a much more slower pace of life here and it helps that the place isn’t flooded with tourists. My tour of Portugal’s monasteries starts with Alcobaça. Hopefully, this will give me a nice introduction to the life within the monastery walls as well as some architectural showcases which these monasteries are also known for.

I noticed that the rooms of the monastery were very well kept. They are mostly stone and most of them have designs which probably won’t be out of place in a church. I think it is incredible that people used to make this all by hand coming from an era where everything is mass produced. Inside the museum, I would enter rooms which are devoid of furniture. It was difficult to know what this used to be by in one of the rooms, I suspected that it used to be a chapel. There were vaulted ceilings in the room which made it look like a church. The left side of the room had a flight ot stairs that seem to lead nowhere. I was thinking that this would have led to a pulpit where the priest would be giving his sermon from.

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