Alcobaça Monastery is a catholic monastery located in central Portugal in the town of Alcobaça which is around 110km north of Lisbon. Established in 1153 the monastery became the richest and most influential in Portugal by 1300 with almost 1,000 monks and a number of business interests including farming, fishing and trade. The church and the monastery were the first Gothic buildings in Portugal and because of its artistic, cultural and historical relevance it was included in UNESCO’s World Heritage Site list in 1989.
The main façade of the monastery has two plain-style wings with the church in the middle. The façade of the church is a mix of styles: the portal and the rose window above were part of the original church, while the statues and the two flanking towers were added in the beginning of the 18th century. The side walls of the church have crenellations and the apse has eight flying buttresses to support the weight of the vault of the apse, a typical feature of Gothic architecture.
The church is a Latin-cross building with pronounced transept arms and three aisles. The lateral aisles of the nave are as high (20 metres) as the central one, which together with the relative slenderness of the church (17 metres) and large length (106 metres) conveys an impression of monumentality. Alcobaça remains, after 800 years, the largest Portuguese church. The vertical emphasis observed in the building is a typical Gothic feature.
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