Mosteiro de São Vicente de Fora: Cloisters of Tiles
Why is it significant?
Stand in the square and look up at the cool white façade: two towers, three tall arches, rows of saints in their niches. It is severe, almost military. Nothing on the outside prepares you for the blue storm inside. The name means Saint Vincent Outside, outside the walls.
Key Facts
| Place | Mosteiro de São Vicente de Fora: Cloisters of Tiles |
|---|---|
| Address | Largo de São Vicente, 1100-572 Lisboa, Portugal |
| Geo Coordinates | 38.71470, -9.12750 |
| Part of Walk | Lisbon in Blue and White: Graça, São Vicente & the Azulejo Trail |
| Generated | Generated |
Stand in the square and look up at the cool white façade: two towers, three tall arches, rows of saints in their niches. It is severe, almost military. Nothing on the outside prepares you for the blue storm inside.
The name means Saint Vincent Outside, outside the walls. After King Afonso Henriques took Lisbon from the Moors in 1147, he founded a monastery here, beyond the city walls, close to where crusaders who died in the siege were buried. What you see today was rebuilt from 1582 by Philip II of Spain, who had just become king of Portugal too, and it was consecrated in 1629.
Go inside and walk the cloisters, and you are surrounded by azulejos, thousands upon thousands of them, mostly from the eighteenth century. Blue and white panels cover the walls from floor to waist and higher, with landscapes, ornamental frames and scenes from the monastery's own history, including the conquest of Lisbon. Upstairs is the series everyone falls in love with: around forty panels illustrating the fables of La Fontaine. The fox and the crow, the wolf and the lamb, the frog who wanted to be as big as an ox... moral lessons for monks, painted with a sense of humour.
Off the cloister lies the old refectory, which since the nineteenth century has been the pantheon of the House of Braganza, the dynasty that ruled Portugal from 1640 until 1910. Here lies Catherine of Braganza, who married Charles II and helped make tea fashionable in England. And here lie King Carlos I and his heir Luís Filipe, shot dead in an open carriage in Praça do Comércio on 1 February 1908, two years before the monarchy fell.
Under a ceiling of painted architecture that pretends to open to the sky, the tiles keep telling their stories to whoever stops to look. Now come out into the square and walk east into the long open space beside the monastery. If it is a market day, you will hear it before you see it.