Cloisters of Jerónimos Monastery
The Jerónimos Monastery in Lisbon is one of the most important landmarks in the country. Arguably this is one of the finest examples of monastery in the country. It shows in the number of people visiting the place. I mamanged to get in the monastery before it closed for the afternoon. One thing to note is that when purchasing a ticket is is possible get one for the nearby Tower of Belem, also part of the UNESCO World Heritage site list. Alas it was already late in the afternoon and they only sell tickets up to a certain time since there won’t be any time to get to the tower to begin with. So my advice is to get to visit in the morning so you would have more time to explore these two magnificent structures.
Exploring Jerónimos Monastery
The monastery is dedicated to Saint Jerome. It is no longer associated with the church so there are no more services being held here. I’m surprised that such an important place would be secularized but this is probably the trend with other churches in the region. This was not the case back then. The monastery was a project of the King Manuel I after whom the style Manueline was named after. At that time, Portugal was also in the midst of a boom because of its successes in exploration. As a result, trade was booming and there were available funds to construct a grand monastery here in Lisbon. This enabled the architects to go wild with their ideas and thus the birth of the Manueline style. This focus on construction of the Jerónimos Monstery had an effect of sucking funding from other places, most notably the impressive but incomplete Monastery at Batalha, which I happened to visit earlier in the trip.
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