The Convent of Christ, Tomar

People come for the Templars and spend most of their visit in buildings the Templars never saw. The Order was suppressed in 1312; the window everyone photographs was cut around 1512. What is actually here is stranger and better than the legend: a twelfth-century round church turned into the apse of a sixteenth-century one, a window carved as ship’s rigging and seaweed, and ninety seconds away, a cloister of such cold Italian discipline that the two cannot be reconciled at all.

Who was actually here, and when

Gualdim Pais became fourth Master of the Temple in Portugal in 1157 and founded the castle at Tomar in 1160, moving the Order’s Portuguese seat here. In July 1190 an Almohad army under Yaqub al-Mansur took the main gate and was thrown back out of it — which is why it has been the Porta do Sangue, the Blood Gate, ever since. Pais died in 1195 and was buried down in the town.

Clement V suppressed the Temple in 1312. Seven years later, at King Dinis’s petition, John XXII created the Order of Christ to inherit the Templars’ Portuguese property — a national workaround for a papal decision. Its first seat was at Castro Marim in the Algarve; it moved to Tomar in the 1350s. Sources disagree on the year: UNESCO’s own inscription text says 1344, others 1356 or 1357.

Then the thing that made Tomar what it is. Prince Henry the Navigator was made governor and administrator of the Order — a post invented because he could not take vows — and channelled its revenues into the Atlantic voyages. The Cross of Christ went onto the sails. When Manuel I became the first king to hold the mastership in his own person, the money coming back from the Discoveries was spent here, and that is what the famous carving is made of.

The castle, and the walls

The curtain wall, the alcáçova and the keep — one of the earliest true keeps in Portugal, imported crusader engineering — are the genuinely Templar fabric, along with the Blood Gate. Note that this whole section has been closed through the recent works and had no announced reopening at the time of writing.

The Charola

The round church is sixteen-sided on the outside and octagonal on the inside — a central drum on eight piers, arched out to a sixteen-sided ambulatory. Almost every guide, including older versions of this page, calls it sixteen-sided full stop, and standing under it you can see why that will not do.

It was built in two campaigns, about 1160–1190 and, after a forty-year interruption caused by the Almohad wars, about 1230–1250 — which is why the upper work reads Gothic while the lower reads Romanesque. The drum carries a strongly vertical ribbed dome; the ambulatory is barrel-vaulted.

And now the thing to understand about this room: everything you can see coloured is Manueline, not Templar. From 1499 Manuel I ordered the interior covered, and between about 1510 and 1515 the workshop of the court painter Jorge Afonso supplied a polyptych of twelve oil-on-oak panels, each around four metres by two and a half — the Baptism, the Raising of Lazarus, the Entry into Jerusalem, the Resurrection, the Ascension, the Last Judgment and the rest. Five survive complete, one incomplete and two as fragments; they were returned here in 2001 after conservation. The painted and gilded wooden figures are by the Fleming Olivier de Gand and the Spaniard Fernão Muñoz.

A restoration running from the late 1980s to 2013 stripped away whitewash and recovered Manueline trompe-l’œil painting on the ambulatory vault that nobody had seen for centuries. That, rather than the shape of the room, is the reason to stand still in it.

The arch, and the nave that was added

In 1515 João de Castilho cut a triumphal arch through the Charola’s west face, demoting the round church to the chancel of a new one. The nave itself is a two-storey block built against that face by Diogo de Arruda between 1510 and 1513 — the monks’ high choir above, the sacristy below, under a single-span ribbed and coffered vault, with three entrance arches smothered in mixed Manueline, Renaissance and Plateresque ornament.

The whole logic of the building is in that one operation: a twelfth-century round church turned into the apse of a sixteenth-century one, without either being demolished.

The window

Diogo de Arruda designed it between 1510 and 1513 — designed, as master of the works; he did not carve it himself. It is on the west face of the choir block, flanked by two enormous buttresses, and you look at it from the Cloister of Santa Bárbara, from below and outside. There is no chapter house behind it: the one it was meant to light was never finished, which is where both the name and the confusion come from.

Read it from the ground up. At the base, a swollen mass of gnarled roots or a tree stump, out of which the whole composition grows — the Manueline’s favourite conceit, architecture as vegetation. Set into it is a bearded male head. Every guidebook calls him the Old Man of the Sea; others make him Camões’s Velho do Restelo, which is anachronistic by sixty years, or a self-portrait of Arruda. None of the three has a sixteenth-century source.

Above him: colonnettes carved as pruned tree trunks, lopped branches and all; heavy ship’s cable, knotted and looped, binding the shafts — recognisably rigging rather than ornamental rope; cork floats strung along the cable like beads, the buoys of a net-line; coral, seaweed, foliage and flowers massed over every surface; armillary spheres, Manuel I’s personal device; and at the top the royal arms, crowned, surmounted by the Cross of the Order of Christ — the emblem that was on the caravel sails. Local tradition counts two hundred distinct symbols in it, including peppercorns and parrots. Nobody has published that count either.

One thing worth knowing if you are comparing photographs: the window was scaffolded and sheeted from July 2022 to August 2023 for a million-euro cleaning, and at the deepest point of the work a printed photograph of it was displayed in its place. The method was deliberately chemical-free — the work area was enclosed so that lichens and micro-organisms died off without light or humidity, and the stone was then cleaned by hand. It has been markedly paler and more legible ever since.

The cloister that is the real masterpiece

Ninety seconds from the window is the Cloister of Dom João III, and it is the better building. Castilho began it in 1533; it was pulled down in May 1554 and entirely redesigned by Diogo de Torralva, then finished by Filippo Terzi in 1583. Square plan with cut corners, two barrel-vaulted storeys, spiral staircases concealed in two of the corners, warm stone, diaphanous galleries.

It matters because Torralva is working directly from Sebastiano Serlio. The rhythm of the arcade is the serliana — an arch flanked by trabeated bays — handled with a confidence that is not provincial in the least. It is routinely called a masterpiece of European Mannerism rather than merely a Portuguese one. In 1581 the Cortes met in it and recognised Philip II of Spain as king of Portugal.

Standing in this cloister within two minutes of that window is the whole reason to come to Tomar: the same institution, the same century, two irreconcilable ideas of what a building is for.

The other six cloisters

There are eight, and you will normally see four or five. Henry the Navigator’s two are the earliest: the Cemetery Cloister of about 1420, built as the burial ground of the friars of the Order, and the Washing Cloister, two storeys, named for the friars’ laundry. From 1532 onwards came the working machinery of a sixteenth-century monastic town: the Hospedaria for guests, by Castilho and the grandest of them; the Corvos, the Ravens, repeating its plan more plainly; and the Micha, named for the loaf doled out at the gate, which housed the novitiate and the almsgiving. On the Micha’s first floor is the Chapel of the Magi, intersecting barrel vaults on Corinthian columns, called one of the masterpieces of the Portuguese Renaissance. The eighth is the small latrine cloister.

The rooms people walk past

The Portaria Nova of the seventeenth century is plain-style, and its three-flight staircase is lined with blue and white azulejos under a painted wooden ceiling. It is the first thing most visitors pass and the last thing they look at.

The dormitory corridors on the upper floor are barrel-vaulted with oak coffering in a classical idiom, cells opening off both sides, and they make the best-composed photograph in the building. Where the corridors cross, a chapel holds a terracotta Seated Christ of 1654 by Inácia da Encarnação.

The refectory is barrel-vaulted with stone ribs and wooden coffering and has two facing pulpits carrying Renaissance emblems, one of them for reading aloud at meals. Beyond it the kitchen, with hearths on an industrial scale — and the kitchen is where the aqueduct was going.

Do not miss the Sacristia Filipina, late sixteenth-century and Mannerist, dramatically lit. In visitor accounts it is consistently the sleeper hit of the whole place.

The aqueduct, and who did not build it

The Aqueduto dos Pegões was designed by Filippo Terzi from 1584 and built between 1593 and 1619, under the Spanish Habsburg kings — roughly a century and a half after Henry the Navigator died. It runs about 6.2 kilometres with 180 arches and a fall of 26 metres, and at the Pegões valley fifty-eight round arches ride on sixteen pointed ones. It was taken out of service in the mid-twentieth century and carries no water today.

It is three or four kilometres out of town, free and unstaffed, and you can walk the channel along the top. Two very common claims about it — that it is Templar, and that it still supplies the convent — are both wrong.

The rest of the story, and what UNESCO listed

Julius III’s bull of 1551 made the mastership of the Order perpetually royal, which finished the job Manuel had begun: an order of knights had become, in effect, a department of the crown with an enormous building budget. Thirty years later the Cortes sat in the great cloister and handed the kingdom to Philip II of Spain, and the aqueduct outside is that regime’s contribution. Conventual life ended with the dissolution of the religious orders in 1834; the place became a national monument in 1910.

UNESCO inscribed it in 1983 under criteria (i) and (vi), and the citation makes the point better than most guidebooks do: a monument originally built to symbolise the Reconquest came, in the Manueline period, to symbolise exactly the opposite — the opening up of Portugal to other civilisations. That is not a flourish. It is a description of what happens when you walk from the Templar keep to the chapter house window in twenty minutes.

It is now Portugal’s fourth most-visited monument, with a little over 350,000 visitors in 2025 — roughly 960 a day averaged out. That is heavy for the Charola, which is a small room, and almost nothing in the outer cloisters, which is where you should go when a coach arrives.

What most visitors get wrong

They come for a Templar building and get a Renaissance one. They see the Charola, which takes twenty minutes, and leave a place that takes three hours. They photograph the window and never turn round to look at the cloister behind them. They look for Templar tombs, which are down in the town at Santa Maria do Olival. They credit the aqueduct to Prince Henry. They budget €6 or €10 from an old blog, and it is €15. And in 2025 and 2026, they arrive without checking what is shut, which at the worst point would have cost them the castle, the garden, the walls, two cloisters and half of a third.

Don’t miss

• The cork floats on the window Strung along the carved cable like beads on a net-line. Once you see them the whole thing reads as rigging.
• The triumphal arch from inside the Charola The exact point where a round church became somebody else’s apse.
• The trompe-l’œil on the ambulatory vault Under whitewash for centuries; recovered by 2013.
• The Cloister of Dom João III, immediately after the window Two irreconcilable ideas of architecture, ninety seconds apart.
• The Sacristia Filipina The room nobody photographs and everybody remembers.

Insider tips

Walk up through the Mata dos Sete Montes if the passage is open — it is the convent’s own former enclosure, and it is a far better approach than the road.

Give the town an hour afterwards. Tomar was laid out by the Order of Christ on a grid below the hill, and the Synagogue of Tomar, from before 1497, is one of the best-preserved medieval synagogues in Portugal. It is free.

If you are doing the three great monasteries, remember they now cost €15 each. Tomar is the one to give the most time to.

More in Portugal

• Batalha Monastery — the Gothic one, and the other half of a good two-day circuit.
• Alcobaça Monastery — Cistercian plainness, and the royal tombs.
• All the churches worth visiting in Portugal