Sacred Art Museum of Arouca Monastery

Beautiful monastery, a must see if you visit Arouca. It has lots of religious artifacts, if you have time my advice to you is to take the full tour of the museum. The monastic building constituted by the church, choir, cloisters, dormitories and fence, was classified as a National Monument in 1910. The current construction was built from the late seventeenth century and the next century. It overlapped all existing buildings and erased all previous architectural structures that were built from the tenth century. In the thirteenth century, the Holy Queen Mafalda, turned the monastery to the Cistercian rule, and changing the name to the Monastery of Santa Maria de Arouca. The quality of its architecture, and the complementary arts, is justified by the high socio-cultural strata of the nuns who lived in it.

The monastery and art museum are wrapped into one tour. The monastery is beautiful, however the only available tour was in Portuguese, making it difficult to understand most of the tour. Still worth a visit if you're in the area.

From century XII until today... Very interesting.

A beautiful building inside and out. Make sure you get a tour of the old monastery - not just the church. Seeing the museum dedicated to the nuns and hearing about their vows of silence is fascinating.

The visit is almost running, it doesn't give you enough time for you to carefully see the exhibition