Batalha Monastery

Batalha Monastery tickets: which one to buy

A single ticket covers the whole site, and it is cheap; the church itself is free, so paying gets you the cloisters, the chapter house, the founder's chapel and the Imperfect Chapels, which is where the interest lies. Queues are short except when several coaches arrive at once. Most visitors come on a circuit rather than alone, because Batalha sits within twenty minutes of Fatima, Alcobaca and Nazare and half an hour of Tomar, and almost every day trip from Lisbon strings three or four of these together.

Those trips usually cover transport and a guide but leave the entrance fees to you, so budget for them separately. If you drive, a combined ticket sold at the sister monasteries of Alcobaca and Tomar covers all three and saves about a third, which is the best deal in central Portugal. A private guided tour of Batalha alone lasts about an hour and is genuinely useful here, because the building is a lesson in how Gothic turned into Manueline and none of that is explained on the walls.

Visiting Batalha Monastery: what to see

King John I promised the Virgin a monastery if he beat Castile, and after the victory at Aljubarrota in 1385 he kept the promise; building began in 1386 and continued for a century and a half under fifteen architects. The result is the finest Flamboyant Gothic in Portugal, cut in honey-coloured limestone that turns gold late in the day. In the founder's chapel lie John I and Philippa of Lancaster, hand in hand on their tomb, with their son Henry the Navigator nearby.

The royal cloister is the set piece: plain Gothic arcades filled in a century later with Manueline tracery of ropes, armillary spheres and crosses of the Order of Christ, so dense it looks like lace. The chapter house holds Portugal's tomb of the unknown soldiers under a vault 19 metres across that two architects refused to build before Huguet risked it. Behind the church stand the Imperfect Chapels, an octagon of eight chapels left open to the sky when the money and the will ran out in the sixteenth century.

Batalha Monastery opening hours and the best time to go

The monastery opens in the morning and closes in the early evening in summer, an hour earlier from October to March, with last admission half an hour before. Coach groups from Lisbon arrive between eleven and two, so the first hour after opening and the last two hours of the day are quiet. The stone reads best in the low light of the late afternoon, especially on the west front and in the Imperfect Chapels, which are open to the weather and so are miserable in rain and glorious at sunset.

Allow an hour and a half for a proper look, half a day if you also want the village and the battlefield monument at Aljubarrota a few kilometres away. The church is a working parish and services interrupt visits on Sunday mornings. Entry is free on Sunday mornings for residents, which does not help visitors but does make the site busier. There is little shade in the cloisters at midday in summer.