Three Cloisters at the Convento de Cristo Return to the Visitor Route This Month, and a Planned Lift Was Abandoned to Save a Fifteenth-Century Wall
The Terreiro de Armas follows in October and the Patio da Botica by December. Heritage chief Joao Soalheiro says a four million euro contract had to be cut because going ahead as designed would have destroyed the fabric it was meant to restore.
Three cloisters at the Convento de Cristo in Tomar should be back on the visitor route before the end of September, and the Terreiro de Armas in October. The monument's director, Andreia Galvão, told the Lusa agency that the cloisters of Santa Bárbara, D. João III and Lavagem will be "fully available" this month, with the last works meeting held on 31 August.
The convent, a World Heritage site in the Santarém district, was given 5.2 million euros under Portugal's recovery plan, the PRR, for work on the cloisters and on the Paço Henriquino, the Alcáçova and castle, and the garden. The deadline for the plan's main heritage works was 31 August.
The lift that was never installed
The more interesting part of the story is what did not get built. The president of Património Cultural, João Soalheiro, told Lusa that the programme had to be altered mid-execution, and that a contract worth around four million euros for the Paço Henriquino was shortened as a result.
"We set out to follow a certain itinerary that we had to correct halfway along the route," he said. Some of the solutions that had been designed turned out to be incompatible with characteristics of the building that were only identified once work began. His summary is unusually candid for a public works statement: "At a certain point we realised that if we went ahead with the project that had been contracted we would destroy heritage."
He was careful to say this did not mean the project had been badly drawn. It meant that knowledge of the monument had been "superficial" when it was drawn, in particular because archaeology had not been involved. The example he gave is a lift, planned on accessibility grounds, whose intended location turned out to be one of the oldest parts of the built fabric, dating from the fifteenth century. "We had to go back, in a heritage attitude, reassess and recalibrate and study the situation properly."
Where the money went
Soalheiro put the intervention in the Santa Bárbara and D. João III cloisters at more than 1.7 million euros, and the work on the Claustro da Lavagem together with areas of the Paço Henriquino and the Terreiro de Armas at more than 1.5 million. The Pátio da Botica accounts for about 400,000 euros and is designed to close the visitor circuit properly; it falls outside the PRR deadline and is expected to finish by the end of the year.
Património Cultural did not tell Lusa the final PRR execution figure for the convent after the changes. It also noted that meeting the 31 August deadline does not mean every contract at every site is fully concluded: the European target required the conclusion of the "main works" at 81 museums, monuments and palaces and three national theatres, with the remaining interventions expected to end by December.
More work is already scheduled at Tomar beyond the recovery plan, including the museum conversion of the ground floor of the Claustro da Lavagem in early 2027. As the director put it, "the life of a monument does not end with the PRR".
What this means for expats
- Plan a Tomar visit for October: the three cloisters open this month, but the Terreiro de Armas follows in October and the Pátio da Botica later still.
- The deadline was national: the heritage institute had until midnight on 31 August to show 84 museums, palaces and theatres finished, and to account for 243 million euros.
- Closures have cost visitors: Portugal's national museums and monuments lost 221,929 visitors in 2025 with 17 sites shut for these very works.
- You can preview several sites online: a government portal puts 90 monuments and museums online for virtual visits.
