SUNDAY’S SPECIAL SPOT – ALCOBACA MONASTERY

Historic, gothic and the resting place of royals, Portugal’s Alcobaça Monastery is found 121 km/75 mi north of Lisbon. It is the earliest example of gothic style churches in the country. King Afonso Henríques (first king of Portugal) established it 1153 C.E. to honour the victory of Santarem during the Crusades and presented it to Cistercian abbot Bernard of Clairvaux, a staunch supporter of the Crusades. Construction began years later in 1178 and became the home of this order of Cistercian monks. With close ties to the Portuguese monarchy it houses numerous tombs of past kings. In 1989 UNESCO recognized Alcobaça Monastery as a world heritage site.

Personally I find this building very beautiful and admire the gothic style, so I chose two photos to showcase it.

AlcobaçaCloister
Cloister at Alcobaca Monastery

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons – By Flávio de Souza (Own work) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

Mosteiro de Alcobaca 27a
Interior of Cloister of Alcobaca Monastery

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Photo Credit: Wikimedia Commons – By Waugsberg (Deutsch: eigene Aufnahme English: own photograph)  via Wikimedia Commons

Please leave a reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

Website Powered by WordPress.com.

Up ↑

%d bloggers like this: