Batalha Monastery

A king promised the Virgin a monastery if he won a battle he had no business winning. He won it, Portugal stayed independent, and seven reigns and five hundred years of building followed — through a plague of masters, a Manueline gold rush, an earthquake, a French sack and a Romantic restoration. It is still not finished. The most extraordinary room in it has no roof, and never had one, and that is the reason people come.

The battle, and the promise

In 1383 King Fernando I died leaving no son, and under a treaty already signed his daughter Beatriz — married to the king of Castile — would carry the Portuguese crown into Castile. Lisbon’s merchants and much of the lesser nobility refused, and in April 1385 the Cortes acclaimed João, Master of Avis, the late king’s illegitimate half-brother, as king.

Castile invaded. On 14 August 1385, at São Jorge near Aljubarrota, a Portuguese force of perhaps 6,600 — including around two hundred English longbowmen — met a Castilian coalition several times its size. Under João and his constable Nuno Álvares Pereira they dug flanking pits, dismounted, held a ridge and let the archery do its work: Crécy tactics, applied in Iberia. The Castilians were broken. Portugal remained a separate country for another two hundred years, and the House of Avis was founded.

By tradition João vowed the monastery to the Virgin on the eve of the battle — hence its real name, Santa Maria da Vitória. The battle-histories record only that he founded it afterwards in thanks; take the vow as the story Portugal tells, which it has told for six hundred years. Work began in 1386, and Dominican friars were in residence by 1388.

Seven reigns and a queue of master builders

The first plan was Afonso Domingues’, a Rayonnant Gothic scheme with an English Perpendicular accent that nobody in Portugal had used before. From 1402 the master was Huguet — probably Catalan, though the legend insists he was Irish — who raised the nave higher than intended and built the west front, the Chapter House vault and the Founder’s Chapel, and began the Unfinished Chapels. After him came Fernão de Évora (the sober second cloister), then, from about 1480, Mateus Fernandes, and with him the Manueline.

That is the simplified chain, and it is worth saying it is simplified: the documents name around a dozen masters across the centuries. Work effectively stopped in 1517, with sporadic additions into the 1530s.

Sack, suppression, and a Romantic rebuild

The 1755 earthquake did damage. In 1810–11 Masséna’s troops sacked and burned the complex during the French invasions, emptying the tomb of João II and scattering his bones. In 1834 Portugal dissolved the religious orders, the Dominicans were expelled, and the buildings were left to rot.

From 1840 a long restoration was pushed by King Fernando II, the artist-king, and much of the skyline you photograph — pinnacles, crestings, openwork parapets — is that campaign rather than the fifteenth century. It is honest work, but it is not 1400. Batalha became a national monument in 1907 and a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1983.

The visitor's cheat sheet

What to see, in the order you meet it

The church

The west portal is a deep Flamboyant funnel of six orders of archivolts crowded with apostles, prophets, kings and angels, with Christ in Majesty and the Evangelists in the tympanum. Then you go in, and the building does the one thing nobody expects: it is bare. Eighty metres long, twenty-two wide, thirty-two and a half high — a height-to-width ratio that makes the nave feel like a canyon — and no gilding, no azulejos, no clutter. After the exterior it reads almost as a rebuke.

Look down as you come in. A plain marble slab near the west door is the grave of Mateus Fernandes, who died in 1515 and lies here with his wife — the man who carved the most extravagant portal in Portugal, buried under the feet of everyone walking past it.

The glass is the other surprise: Batalha housed what was probably the first stained-glass workshop in Portugal, staffed at the start by German masters in the 1430s, and holds the oldest surviving stained glass in the country. A second campaign ran from about 1514 under Francisco Henriques, paid for by Manuel I, with the Visitation, the Epiphany, the Flight into Egypt and the Resurrection among its subjects.

The Founder's Chapel

Immediately to the right of the west door: a square room containing an octagon, lit from a lantern, under an eight-pointed star vault. Huguet built it between 1426 and 1434 and it is the first royal pantheon in Portugal. If it feels English, that is because it is — compare the chapter houses at York and Wells.

In the middle lie João I and Philippa of Lancaster, in the first double royal tomb in Portugal, in full regalia under canopies — holding hands. On the tomb chest are their two mottoes: his Portuguese Por bem, “for good”, and her Old French Yl me plet, “it pleases me”. Two languages on one tomb, which is the marriage in miniature.

Along the south wall, in four recessed arches, are their sons — the Ínclita Geração, the Illustrious Generation, as Camões called them. Fernando, who died a hostage in Fez. João, the constable. Pedro, the regent, killed at Alfarrobeira. And Henry the Navigator, alone, unmarried, with his motto on the tomb: Talant de bien faire — the will to do well. The man who launched the Atlantic voyages lies in a side niche; the wealth those voyages brought back paid for the roofless octagon a hundred metres east.

The Royal Cloister

Gothic bones, Manueline skin, and the most photographed space at Batalha. The arcades themselves are early fifteenth century and plain. Then, around 1500, every single arch was filled with a screen of carved stone tracery, attributed to Mateus Fernandes working with Diogo Boitaca, and no two panels are the same.

Learn the vocabulary and the whole cloister opens up. Armillary spheres — Manuel I’s personal device, a navigator’s instrument turned into a royal badge. Crosses of the Order of Christ, which sailed on the sails. Ropes, cables and knots. Shells and pearls. Artichokes, laurel, lotus and briar — the vegetation of places Portuguese ships had just reached. It is an empire carved into a monastery, and it was paid for with pepper.

In one corner, projecting into the garth, is the lavabo, the fountain house where the friars washed before eating, opposite the refectory door. Looking out through its tracery into the garden is the photograph everybody takes, and rightly.

The Chapter House

Off the cloister, and the boldest piece of engineering in the building: a square of about nineteen metres spanned by a star vault with nothing supporting the middle. The story told on site is that the vault was so dangerous that the work was done by condemned prisoners, no free mason being willing; that it collapsed twice; and that when the centring was struck Huguet spent a night alone underneath it to prove his point. It is tradition, not documentation — and the famous Portuguese legend A Abóbada tells it the other way round, with the aged, blinded Afonso Domingues rebuilding the vault after Huguet’s version fell, and dying three days after sitting beneath it. Both stories are told here. Neither is history. The vault, however, is still up.

Since 1921 the room has held the Tomb of the Unknown Soldiers: two unidentified Portuguese dead of the First World War, one from the Western Front in Flanders and one from the African campaign, under a perpetual flame and a permanent military honour guard. The guard is changed periodically through the day; there is no published timetable, so ask at the ticket desk when you arrive and time your visit to the Chapter House around it. Great east window overhead, from the Manueline glazing campaign.

The Cloister of Afonso V

Built by Fernão de Évora between 1448 and 1477: two storeys of plain double pointed arches and not one ornament anywhere. It looks like an anticlimax and it is the most instructive fifty metres on the site. Walk the Royal Cloister first and this one second, and you have watched what happened to Portugal between 1450 and 1510 — a monastic order’s austerity, and then an empire’s money.

The Unfinished Chapels

Out of the main door, round the outside, separate entrance. King Duarte began them in the mid-1430s as a second royal pantheon for his own line, and died in 1438. What stands is a great octagon with seven radiating chapels, colossal buttresses rising round it and stopping in mid-air, and no roof at all. It rains inside. Grass grows in the joints. The tracery of the upper windows stands as free-standing filigree against open sky, and it is one of the most beautiful accidents in European architecture.

The portal is Mateus Fernandes’, finished in 1509: roughly fifteen metres high and seven and a half wide, and there is not a square centimetre of it left plain. Armillary spheres, crosses, angels, ropes, tree stumps, trefoils, crockets, dense vegetal interlace. Carved through the arches and pillars, more than two hundred times, is Duarte’s motto in Old French: Leauté faray tam yaserei — “I shall be loyal as long as I live”. If someone tells you it says Tanto monta, that is Ferdinand of Aragon’s motto and a different country.

Duarte and his queen Leonor of Aragon are buried here, and nobody else. A Renaissance upper arcade was added by João de Castilho around 1530 — obviously a different language from the Manueline below, and proof that the project was still twitching a century after it stalled. Manuel I had by then taken his money, and his own burial plans, to Jerónimos at Belém. The chapels have been open to the sky ever since.

Tickets and tours

Don't miss

• The Unfinished Chapels Separate entrance, outside, round the east end. An octagon open to the sky since 1438, with a portal that took Mateus Fernandes twenty years.
• The clasped hands João I and Philippa of Lancaster on the first double royal tomb in Portugal, holding hands, with a Portuguese motto and an Old French one on the chest.
• Henry the Navigator's tomb Third arch along the south wall of the Founder's Chapel, alone, with Talant de bien faire on it.
• The Chapter House vault Nineteen metres square, unsupported, and surrounded by five hundred years of stories about how it did not fall down.
• Duarte's motto Carved more than two hundred times through the Unfinished Chapels. Once you see it you cannot stop.
• Mateus Fernandes' floor slab Near the west door of the nave. You walk over the architect on the way in.
• The two cloisters, in order Royal first, Afonso V second. Fifty metres, and sixty years of national history.

Insider tips

Time the Unfinished Chapels for low sun. They are roofless, so they are entirely at the mercy of the light: raking sun makes the portal carving legible, flat midday light turns it to grey porridge.

Ask about the changing of the guard at the ticket desk. There is no published schedule for the honour guard in the Chapter House, and it is worth planning around rather than missing by five minutes.

Go to the battlefield. The Aljubarrota interpretation centre at São Jorge is about five kilometres away, on the ridge where the pits were dug. Standing there and then walking into the church built to thank God for it takes an extra hour and makes sense of the whole building. Practically no coach tour does it.

Pair it with Alcobaça, not Tomar. Twenty minutes apart, Dominican against Cistercian, extravagance against austerity — the best monastery day in Portugal. Tomar is fifty minutes further and deserves its own visit.

Where to stay and eat nearby

Batalha is a small town that exists around the monastery, with a row of restaurants on the square doing solid Leiria-region cooking — and it empties in the evening, which is its charm. Most visitors come for a couple of hours from Lisbon or stay at Nazaré or Fátima. If you want the monastery lit at night and to yourself in the morning, stay in the town.

More Portuguese monasteries

• Alcobaça Monastery — twenty minutes away, Cistercian, and the opposite argument in stone.
• Jerónimos Monastery — in Lisbon, and the reason Batalha was abandoned.
• Convent of Christ, Tomar — the Order of Christ's own headquarters, and the other great Manueline building.

See all the Portuguese churches in this guide →