Alcobaça

Water runs through the kitchen. The Cistercians who built Alcobaça diverted a river branch straight through it, the channel still cut into the flagstones. Stand in the nave and the scale hits — a church stretching longer than a football pitch, stripped white, every surface scrubbed to Cistercian austerity.

The Monastery of Alcobaça, founded in 1153 under Portugal's first king and UNESCO-listed, ranks with Europe's finest Cistercian buildings — its church among the country's largest, built to the order's insistence on bare proportion and light. Its gravity centre is the paired tombs of Pedro I and Inês de Castro: the king and the murdered mistress legend insists he crowned after death, forcing the court to kiss the dead queen's hand. Their fourteenth-century sarcophagi — masterpieces of European funerary carving — face foot to foot so that, the story goes, they will see each other first at the resurrection. The kitchen's channel kept fish alive to the pot and drove the waterworks; the surrounding orchards still grow the monks' apples and quinces, and the town's confectionery descends straight from monastic egg-yolk recipes. Several early kings lie here besides the lovers — the church served the young dynasty as pantheon.