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Few towns in Portugal carry the weight of history quite as quietly as Alcobaça. Set in the limestone hills of the Estremadura region, roughly an hour's drive north of Lisbon, this small market town built its identity around a single extraordinary monument, and that monument has never stopped earning the attention it receives.

The Monastery of Alcobaça, formally the Mosteiro de Santa Maria de Alcobaça, was founded in the twelfth century by Afonso Henriques, the first king of Portugal, in fulfilment of a vow made before the Battle of Santarém in 1147. What rose over the following centuries became one of the finest examples of Gothic architecture on the Iberian Peninsula, and a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1989. The church's nave is austere and soaring, its proportions governed by a Cistercian discipline that strips ornament down to structure and light. Within the transept lie the carved stone tombs of King Pedro I and Inês de Castro, whose tragic love story became one of the defining romantic narratives of medieval Portugal. The tombs face each other across the transept so that, according to legend, theirs would be the first faces to meet at the resurrection. The craftsmanship of those fourteenth-century effigies, ringed with apostles and angels in high relief, rewards a long and unhurried look.