Bom Jesus de Valverde Convent

This beautiful monument is situated in the lovely small village of Valverde, nearby Évora, in the heart of the vast Alentejo region.

This monastic complex was built in the middle of the 16th century by the Évora’s diocese that established here an estate with a Bishop’s Palace. The first archbishop of Évora, Cardinal Henriqye, founded the convent for the Order of Friars Minor Capuchin, established here in 1517.

This Mitra Estate had some of its features altered throughout the centuries, nevertheless many of them are still maintained. One of the estate’s highlights is the convent Chapel, considered to be a perfect example of renaissance “micro-architecture” attributed to Miguel de Arruda, containing three important panels of the prestige Portuguese Royal Artist Gregório Lopes dated from 1544 and 1545.
From the original convent’s building there are still some architectonic vestiges, many of them Manueline, and also some afterwards elements from restoration works from the 17th and 18th centuries, like several baroque elements.
The Cloyster, with a square floor plan and in Classicism style, was attributed to Manuel Pires.
The “Jericho Garden” conserves nowadays many structures built between the 16th and 18th century, such as the monumental Aqueduct, the cistern-well “casa da água” (water house) and the circular Pond, known as “Cardinal’s pond”.

After the official extinguishing of the religious orders, in the middle of the 19th century, an Agricultural Centre was installed in the Convent, and afterwards the Agriculture Training School. Nowadays is installed in the monument a nucleus od the Évora University, housing among others, an experimental estate for agricultural and biological studies.