Guided Tour

A thousand years is the age of São Geraldo's chalice. A silver piece ordered by D. Afonso Henriques' great-great-great-grandfather to drink with meals. Belonging to the Museu da Sé de Braga, the São Geraldo chalice was made 150 years before the foundation of Portugal and one hundred years before the construction of the Sé de Braga, at the dawn of the reconquest. The chalice of São Geraldo is the oldest testimony in jewelery of how Arab culture is inscribed in the DNA of Iberian Christians.

The Cross of D. Sancho I proves how the first kings of Portugal, contrary to what was conveyed for centuries, were sophisticated and elegant men. Despite the incredible vicissitudes it went through, the Cross of D. Sancho I went through 800 years (almost) unscathed. And it is a testament to the invention of the cross as the main Christian icon.

The treasure of Queen Saint Isabel and her tomb are precious works of European medieval art. And they tell us other stories about the famous wife of D.Dinis. A charitable queen, yes, but also very connected to power and politics. The miracle of the roses was initially attributed to one of her aunts and only entered the roster of miracles of Queen Isabel of Portugal centuries after she had died.

More than 1500 clay figures, modeled by hand according to the historical descriptions of what was the Procession of the Body of God in Lisbon of D. João V, in the century. XVIII. The set was presented to the public for the first time in 1948 and the motivations of its promoter, the successful entrepreneur Diamantino Tojal, who is notable for being particularly religious, are not completely known. But the Bairro da Graça, in Lisbon, was his neighborhood and the production of this monumental piece was, for four years, an aggregator of outstanding figures of the Lisbon life of that time. A guided tour by Rosa Maria Tojal, niece of Diamantino Tojal, and by art historian António Camões Gouveia.

Giovanni Boccaccio, the Italian writer of the century. XIV, produced his masterpiece, Decameron, in the aftermath of the Black Death that devastated a third of the European population. The black environment of those times of plague, so well described in Decameron, explains, in part, the type of architecture that was produced in that period. In Terena, in the Alentejo region, a small church-fortress from the 19th century. XIV still stands as a singular (and perfect) witness to a time of frenzy, distrust and fear. But the Church of Boa Nova de Terena also tells many other stories, some of them mysterious. A guided tour by art historian José Custódio Vieira da Silva.

The riverside area of Belém, in Lisbon, has, over the centuries, been able to successfully host plant species of origins as diverse as Northern Europe, South America or Japan. In the Tropical Botanical Garden, for example, the pines of the islands of São Tomé and Príncipe flourish with more exuberance than in the original territory. To know the history of this beautiful garden is to know part of the history of Portugal's investment in seeking knowledge about overseas agricultural products. From D. João V to the State of Salazar. A guided tour by the coordinator of the team that restored the Tropical Botanical Garden, landscape architect Luís Paulo Ribeiro.