Jerónimos Monastery

Restelo began as a small village on the bank of the Tagus and grew on maritime trade and shipbuilding. The conquest of Ceuta in 1415 and the opening of the routes to the Indies and the African coast drove Portuguese maritime expansion and, with it, the growth of this port, whose anchorage was safe and sheltered from the winds and was sought out by ships entering the mouth of the river. Growth outran the infrastructure, and a population already worn down by hardship at sea was left the more exposed to disease. In 1452 the Infante Dom Henrique ordered the building of the Ermida de Santa Maria de Belém, along with water channels, houses for the clergy and land for growing food. Navigators including Pedro Álvares Cabral and Vasco da Gama kept vigil in that church before setting out. The monks of the military-religious Order of Christ gave assistance to seafarers passing through.

Manuel I, born in 1469, ordered the existing structure inaugurated at the cortes of Montemor-o-Velho in 1495 as a burial place for the House of Aviz, in the belief that an Iberian dynastic kingdom would rule after his death. In 1496 he petitioned the Holy See for leave to raise a great monastery on the site of the old hermitage of the Order of Christ at the entrance to Lisbon; the permission came on 23 June that year in the bull Eximiae devotionis of Pope Alexander VI. The hermitage of Restelo was already in disrepair when Vasco da Gama and his men spent the night in prayer there before departing for India in 1497.

Two years after the papal grant the king made over the place of Santa Maria de Belém to the Hieronymite friars, for a monastery able to house a hundred religious and charged with continuing the services the Order of Christ had given to navigators. Possession was taken in material form on 17 January 1499 and canonically on 21 April 1500.

The accounts differ on when the first stone was laid: one dates the start of work on monastery and church to 6 January 1501, another to 1502. Manuel I paid for it out of the Vintena da Pimenta, a five per cent levy on the commerce of Africa and the Orient reckoned at the equivalent of 70 kilograms of gold a year, with the duties on pepper, cinnamon and cloves going straight to the Crown instead. Resources already earmarked for the Monastery of Batalha, the Aviz pantheon among them, were turned to Belém. Under the monks and a royal vedor at first, the works passed in 1505 to the administration of the Mesa dos Contos. The king chose the Hieronymites to occupy the house, their charge being to pray for his soul and to give spiritual help to the navigators and sailors leaving the port of Restelo, work they carried on for more than four centuries.

Diogo de Boitaca, the first architect over the works, set out the plan of monastery and church and contracted the building of the monastery, the sacristy and the refectory. He had pioneered the ornate style later called Manueline at the Monastery of Jesus in Setúbal, and he built here in calcário de lioz, the gold-coloured limestone quarried at Ajuda, the valley of Alcântara, Laveiras, Rio Seco and Tercena. He probably revised the scale of the scheme in 1513, when the king bought further ground for the building. A second campaign opened on 2 January 1517 under the general direction of João de Castilho, whose handling of sub-contracts put as many as two hundred and fifty men on the site at once, working seven separate fronts: the south portal, the axial portal, the chapter house, the sacristy, the cloister, the refectory and the choir chapels. Master Leonardo Vaz and his officials built the refectory in 1517 and 1518; Rodrigo de Pontezilha finished the chapter-house door in the same two years, though the room itself was left unused, its vault and interior decoration begun only in 1886. Castilho built the sacristy between 1517 and 1520 and roofed the naves and crossing in a single unsupported span, the first great Portuguese hall church. The French sculptor Nicolau Chanterene executed the axial portal, probably his first commission in Portugal, and turned its ornament towards the Renaissance; Castilho's own decoration moved from late Gothic towards the Spanish Plateresque, named for its likeness to worked silver.

In 1517 Leo X made the house the mother house of the order and raised its prior to Provincial. In 1518 Manuel I set down in his will that the monastery was to be his own pantheon. Building stopped when he died in 1521, and Castilho left the works in 1530. Diogo de Torralva took over the direction and held it until 1551, though the date of his arrival is given as 1540 in one account and 1550 in another; he closed off the earlier campaigns, added the main chapel and the choir, completed the two storeys of the monastery in Renaissance motifs alone, built a new porter's lodge that the seventeenth century replaced, designed the stalls of the upper choir and altered the chancel to receive the remains of Manuel I. Diogo de Sarça executed those stalls between 1548 and 1550, and the Crucified Christ of 1550 above the choir balustrade, by the Flemish sculptor Philippe de Vries, was the gift of the Infante Luís in 1551.

Jerónimo de Ruão, also called Jerome de Rouen, held the post of master of works from 1563 until his death in 1601, and brought classical and Mannerist elements into the building. In 1571 Queen Catarina, widow of João III, ordered Boitaca's chancel pulled down and a new one raised in its place; Ruão's Mannerist design set the royal tombs on marble elephants between Ionic and Corinthian columns, Manuel I and Maria of Aragon on one side of the choir, João III and Catarina on the other, with a retable of the Passion and the Adoration of the Magi by the painter Lourenço de Salzedo at the high altar. How the century ended is told two ways: by one account the works halted in 1580 at the union of the Spanish and Portuguese crowns, the money going instead to the building of the Escorial; by another Ruão remained master of works to 1601, a hundred years after the first stone.

On 16 July 1604 Philip of Spain, ruling after the Iberian Union, made the monastery a royal funerary monument and forbade anyone but the royal family and the Hieronymite monks to enter it. A new portal went up in 1625, with the cloister door, the doorkeepers' house, a staircase and the hall giving on to the upper choir, designed by the royal architect Teodósio Frias and executed by the mason Diogo Vaz. In 1640 the prior Bento de Siqueira ordered the building of the library, where the books of the Infante Luís, son of Manuel I, and others belonging to the order were deposited; it held some 8,000 volumes by the time the community was dissolved.

With the restoration of Portuguese independence in 1640 the monastery regained much of its standing as the royal pantheon. Four of the eight children of John IV were entombed within its walls: the Infante Teodósio, who lived from 1634 to 1653, the Infanta Joana, 1636 to 1653, King Afonso VI, 1643 to 1683, and Catarina de Bragança, 1638 to 1705. In 1682 the body of Cardinal Henrique was buried in the transept chapels, where the children of Manuel I also lie; the tomb of Sebastião and the descendants of João III are in the chapel opposite.

In 1663 the Brotherhood of the Senhor dos Passos took over the old Chapel of Santo António, given a gold tiled ceiling in 1669, with the staircase frescos bearing the heraldry of Saint Jerome finished in 1770. The retables were completed in 1709 and 1711, the sacristy redecorated in 1713, and in 1720 the painter Henrique Ferreira was commissioned to paint the kings of Portugal for the Sala dos Reis. The monastery came through the Lisbon earthquake of 1755 with little damage: the balustrade and part of the high choir were ruined and were quickly repaired. On 28 December 1833 it was secularised by state decree and its title passed to the Real Casa Pia de Lisboa, the charitable house for orphans and the destitute, the church becoming the parish church of the new civil parish of Santa Maria de Belém. Much of the monastery's contents was taken by the crown or lost, and the buildings stood largely empty and deteriorating.

On 29 September 1855 the body of Afonso VI was carried out to the Braganza pantheon at the Monastery of São Vicente de Fora, together with his three brothers and his sister. Restoration began after 1860 on the southern facade under the architect Rafael Silva e Castro, and again in 1898 under Domingos Parente da Silva. The cloister cistern, the monks' cells and the kitchen were demolished in this period, while three schemes by the architect J. Colson, which would have introduced revivalist neo-Manueline work, failed to win approval. In 1863 the Casa Pia's ombudsman Eugénio de Almeida hired Valentim José Correia to rearrange the upper storey of the old dormitory and design its windows, work that ran to 1865; Samuel Barret replaced him and built the towers at the far western end of the dormitories, and in 1867 the Italian scenery designers Rambois and Cinatti, who had worked on the São Carlos Theatre, took over the remodelling. Between 1867 and 1868 the two men altered the annexe and the church facade into the form they have kept, demolished the gallery and the Hall of the Kings, built the towers of the eastern dormitory and the rose window of the upper choir, and replaced the pyramid roof of the bell tower with a mitre-shaped one. The collapse of the central dormitory in 1878 held the work up. Raymundo Valladas began contributing after 1884 and set about the cloister and the Sala do Capítulo in 1886, vaulting the ceiling that had been left unfinished since the sixteenth century; the tomb of Alexandre Herculano, designed by Eduardo Augusto da Silva, was placed in that room in 1888.

The remains of Vasco da Gama and of Luís de Camões, the poet who had told da Gama's first voyage in his epic of 1572, were moved into the church in 1880, close to the tombs of Manuel I and João III, the kings da Gama had served. For the fourth centenary in 1898 of the navigator's arrival in India it was decided in 1894 to restore his tomb, and the tombs of both men, carved by the sculptor Costa Mota, were set in the southern lateral chapel. A year later the monastery received the remains of the poet João de Deus, and afterwards the tombs of Almeida Garrett in 1902, Sidónio Pais in 1918, Guerra Junqueiro in 1923 and Teófilo Braga in 1924.

A competition opened by the Ministry of Public Works to finish the annexe as a National Museum of Industry and Commerce was cancelled in 1899, and the Portuguese Ethnological Museum was installed there instead. Costa Mota completed the restoration of the choir stalls in 1924. In 1938 the organ of the high choir was dismantled and stained glass designed by Abel Manta and executed by Ricardo Leone was set in the southern facade. Further remodelling followed in 1939 for the centenary celebrations of modern Portugal, during which Herculano's baldachin and tomb were taken apart and the cloister patio paved. In 1940 the ground in front of the monastery was laid out for the Exposition of the Portuguese World, the Casa Pia gave up the cloister after a century in it, and the tombs of Camões and da Gama were moved to the lower choir. Windows designed by Rebocho and executed by Alves Mendes were finished in 1950. The remains of President Óscar Carmona were entombed in the Sala do Capítulo in 1951 and carried to the National Pantheon in 1966. The Maritime Museum was inaugurated in the western wing in 1963, alongside the National Archaeological Museum in the long neo-Manueline building added on that side.

The monastery has been classified a National Monument of Portugal since 1907, and in 1983 UNESCO designated it a World Heritage Site together with the nearby Tower of Belém. The formal ceremonies for Portugal's entry into the European Economic Community were held in its cloister in 1985, the year the tomb of Fernando Pessoa, by Lagoa Henriques, was placed in the north wing of the lower cloister. The Centro Cultural de Belém, finished in 1993, partly closed off the open view between the monastery and the bank of the Tagus that had stood for centuries.

Two large exhibitions were held here in the 1990s: Four Centuries of Paintings in 1992, and in 1998 a Leonardo da Vinci exhibition that included the Leicester Codex, lent for the occasion by Bill Gates. Conservation, cleaning and restoration continued to the end of the century, taking in the main chapel in 1999 and the cloister between 1998 and 2002. On 13 December 2007 the Treaty of Lisbon, which set out the reform of the European Union, was signed at the monastery; on 7 July that year the building was voted one of the seven wonders of Portugal. Since 2016 it has held the status of National Pantheon. In 2022 it was the most visited monument in the country, with 870,321 entries.