The Convent of Christ, Tomar

Where Portugal’s Templars outlived their own suppression under a new name

The Templars came to the hill above the river Nabão as frontier soldiers. Portugal was a young kingdom, the border with the Moors ran roughly along the Tagus, and around 1160 the Templar master Gualdim Pais raised a castle here with an outer wall, a citadel and a keep. The keep, a tower built for living and fighting at once, was a Templar import to Portugal, and Tomar's is among the oldest in the country. So are the round towers in the outer wall, which stand up to battering better than square ones. The design was tested in 1190, when the armies of the caliph Abu Yusuf al-Mansur, fresh from taking strongholds farther south, came against it and failed. A plaque near the entrance still records the siege.

Inside the walls the knights built their oratory, the Charola. From outside it is a sixteen-sided drum with heavy buttresses and round windows; inside, an octagon of arches stands at the centre with a walkway running round it. Its models were in Jerusalem: the Dome of the Rock, which crusaders took for a remnant of Solomon's Temple, and probably the rotunda of the Holy Sepulchre. UNESCO counts it among the few Templar round churches left standing in Europe, and its Romanesque capitals still carry plants, animals and Daniel among the lions.

When the Templars were suppressed across most of Europe between 1312 and 1314, Portugal took another road. At the request of King Denis, Pope John XXII created the Order of Christ in March 1319, and the Templars' property and many of their members passed into it. By the middle of the century Tomar was its seat. Prince Henry the Navigator led the order from 1417 to 1450 and built two cloisters, and the order's wealth backed the Portuguese voyages of discovery.

The convent kept growing for five centuries. Manuel I, master of the order before he became king, filled the Charola from 1499 with painted and gilded saints under Gothic canopies, and from 1510 he rebuilt the nave in the style later named after him. Its Chapter House window is a carved tangle of ship's ropes, coral, the order's cross and the king's armillary sphere, and a small figure at its foot probably portrays the designer, Diogo de Arruda. John III turned the knights toward a monastic rule and added a Renaissance cloister in 1557. In 1581 the Portuguese nobility gathered here to accept Philip II of Spain as their king.

The castle and convent became a World Heritage Site in 1983. The church still holds services, and a modern Templar order meets here every March.