Up to the Alta,
down to the river

It dates from 1507–1513, the time of D. Manuel I, and follows the lines of the medieval frontage. The portal was added between 1522 and 1526, designed by Diogo de Castilho and carved by Nicolau Chanterene; the three figures above the door — the Virgin, a prophet and King David — are by João de Ruão. The arch in front dates from the early 19th century. It is 22 m from the ground to the top of the towers, without the spires.

A single nave, vaulted between 1507 and 1513, when Boytac was master of works. The walls have blue and white 18th-century tiles, made in Lisbon; on the left side is the pulpit that Nicolau Chanterene made in 1521. Above the entrance, the upper choir holds the choir stalls of 1512.

In the chancel lie D. Afonso Henriques and D. Sancho I. D. Manuel I did not find the old chests worthy of them and had these made; the recumbent effigies are by Nicolau Chanterene, and the tombs have been in this place since 1535. It is because of them that Santa Cruz is a National Pantheon.

Built between 1517 and 1522 over an earlier cloister, with the work directed by Marcos Pires. Five bays on each side and two storeys, the lower one vaulted; in the centre, the basin with a fountain, from 1639.

It stood in the middle of one of the three cloisters of the monastery. After the religious orders were abolished, one of the wings was demolished to straighten the street, and the fountain remained: the small temple in the centre and the four turrets in the water, designed by João de Ruão, with the stonework contracted in 1533. It is one of the first entirely Renaissance works made in Portugal.

On the main door and the large window above it, the columns and archivolts follow one another like a shell, with decoration of Islamic influence. The church was designed by master Roberto, and the first stone is thought to have been laid in 1162; D. Sancho I was crowned here in 1185. It is 19 m from the street to the top of the battlements.

Added to the north façade around 1530, it is attributed to the architect João de Ruão and the sculptor Nicolau Chanterene. It is of white limestone, in three tiers one above the other, like an altarpiece: the portal, the loggia and the crowning, which recalls the Roman triumphal arches.

Inside, three naves of five bays and a short transept, with a barrel vault over the central nave. Above the crossing rises the lantern tower, square and Gothic. Of the 16th-century Sevillian tiles that lined the pillars and naves, what remains is in a few openings and arcosolia. It is 28 m from the floor to the top of the dome.

It is short because the church had to be set on the slope: on the west side a large stone platform had to be built to level the incline. In the chancel is the gilded and polychrome wooden altarpiece by the Flemish sculptors Olivier de Gand and Jean de Ypres (1498), which glorifies the Virgin in the Assumption.

Begun in 1218, under the protection of D. Afonso II, it was the first Gothic cloister built in Coimbra. It has a single storey, with five pointed bays on each side; the capitals have naturalistic decoration and the tympana, rose windows. One of the chapels now holds the tomb of D. Sesnando.

Beneath this courtyard lies the Roman cryptoporticus: two floors of vaulted galleries that held up the platform of the forum of Aeminium, the square at the centre of the town. The courtyard roughly matches that square. The first cryptoporticus, from the time of Augustus, ended up embedded in a much larger one, built between Claudius and Nero. The galleries can be visited from the museum.

By the end of the 11th century nothing was left of the forum, and the bishop's palace stood on top of the cryptoporticus. It took up, more or less, the block whose south front faces this courtyard. Bishop D. Miguel Salomão spent 400 morabitinos on the works before 1176. A description from 1416 places stables, a hayloft, a two-stone mill and a granary in the south wing. The palace was rebuilt over the centuries and, early in the 20th century, became a museum.

It was built at the end of the 16th century, on top of a tall rubble wall that hid the west front of the cryptoporticus, in ruins since the late 14th or early 15th century. It is attributed to Filipe Tércio. Its two floors are open on both sides — round arches on columns below, a colonnade above — and from it you see the Sé and the roofs of the town.

The church Count Sesnando knew was rebuilt from the ground up from the 1160s, much larger, and consecrated between 1192 and 1206. Of the Romanesque church there remain walls — a blind arcade of the front — and the bases of the piers, which can be seen inside the museum. It is 21 m from the ground to the highest point.

At the south-east corner of the museum stands a gate-tower from the second half or the end of the 12th century, from when the palace was rebuilt. It is lower than it was, and the merlons are not the original ones. It was restored while António Augusto Gonçalves ran the museum (1913–1929): the springers of the outer arch were remade after those of the inner arch, which was complete.

The main entrance, named after the iron gate that closes it. It was built between 1633 and 1634 on the site of the old gate of the royal palace, and bears the figures of D. Dinis, who founded the university, and of D. João III, who settled it in Coimbra for good.

It was an Islamic fortress, a royal palace from the 12th century and the home of the university since 1544. In the middle, the statue of D. João III. The south side is left open: it is the balcony over the Mondego valley.

The colonnade with a staircase on the façade of the former royal palace, facing the courtyard. It dates from the late 18th century.

The former Throne Room of the palace. Today it hosts the great ceremonies of academic life: the opening of the academic year, the inauguration of rectors, doctoral examinations.

Built between 1728 and 1733, to a design by the Italian architect António Canevari. It is 34 m from the ground to the top — the highest point on the hill.

The university chapel, rebuilt around 1520 and enriched over the following centuries: the 17th-century tiles, the 18th-century baroque organ.

Built between 1717 and 1728, in the reign of D. João V, after whom it is named. It leans against the slope: on the valley side, the building goes far below the level of the courtyard.

The aqueduct is Roman in origin: the water is thought to have been collected on the slope between Rua de Pedro Monteiro and Avenida de D. Afonso Henriques and reached the Alta on arches. D. Sebastião had it rebuilt in 1570. Here, where the ground is lowest, it is 13 m from the ground to the top of the channel.

The channel runs over the arches at almost the same level from one end to the other, while the ground falls away: that is why the arches grow taller in the middle. The stone D. Sebastião had set up says he had it rebuilt “more nobly than it had been made many years before”. At this bend it is 8 m.

On the side of the square, the last arch is lower and more elaborate: pilasters, an entablature and a coat of arms in the attic. Above the channel, an open shrine on four columns, with a statue and a dome topped by a cross. It is 15 m from the ground to the cross.

On the Alta side, the aqueduct stops abruptly: it was cut through during the Estado Novo works to open access to the university Alta, from the penultimate arch. It used to run to where the castle was raised in the Middle Ages; in 1579, Cardinal D. Henrique ordered a “ring” to be made to share the water out across the town.

Iron and glass, Neo-Gothic: it was designed by the engineer Pezerat in 1854 and finished in 1865. In Coimbra it marked the advance of iron and glass in architecture, and it replaced the greenhouse by Manuel Alves Macomboa from the garden’s first works. It is 10 m from the ground to the top of the central block.

The lowest terrace holds the oldest part of the garden. The fountain in the middle dates from the works of 1944–1949, the same ones that built the Cold Greenhouse and set up the statue of Júlio Henriques. Around it grow three trees from Brotero’s time, some two hundred years old: a Cunninghamia, a Cryptomeria and an Erythrina.

Above the gate of the central square, a stone records that the lower terrace, with its flights of steps and pond, was finished in the 1790s. The first design for the garden had been turned down as too lavish — more suited to princes than to students, in the Marquis of Pombal’s view; the second began to be built in 1774, directed by the Italian naturalists Domenico Vandelli and Dalla Bella.

By the main gate, the statue of Félix de Avelar Brotero, director of the garden from 1791 to 1811, made by Soares dos Reis in 1887. It is flanked by two Ginkgo biloba, the “living fossil”.

The garden takes up part of the old grounds of the College of São Bento and steps down the hillside in terraces, levelled with the rubble of the town castle and of the College of Jesus and held up by retaining walls. This one, below the greenhouse terrace, rises 7 m. The water comes from a spring on Rua de Pedro Monteiro and reaches the garden entrance in a gallery, from where it feeds the fountains down the slope.

The church has no door to the west: it belonged to an enclosed convent of nuns. High up in the gable opens a rose window of great size. Only its frame survives, with the lower half rebuilt in the DGEMN restoration works.

The church was divided in two: to the west, the nuns’ choir, four bays long; to the east, three bays for the laity, who came in through this portal. It is fully Gothic, without a tympanum, with four pointed archivolts. Of the triangular crowning, in the manner of a gablet, only traces remain.

Triple: the polygonal apse of three sides, now in ruins, between two side chapels that are square outside and polygonal inside. No other like it survives in Portuguese architecture. The side chapels were given flat terrace roofs in the 1992–94 project, to show their cubic shape; the rose window in the gable was rebuilt in the 1930s from the fragments found.

It is not a tower: in 1260 the general chapter of the Franciscans, at Narbonne, forbade bell towers built like towers. It is a wall with the opening for the bell, crowned by a triangle, the only element that breaks the horizontality of the church, and it marks on the outside the centre of the nuns’ choir. It is 21 m from the excavated floor to the top.

At some 2,530 m², it is enormous: the north and south walks are 54 m long, when the custom was around a hundred feet a side, some 28 m. Low walls and the bases of the piers remain. In front of the refectory, the excavation found the lavabo in 1997, with a great round basin; in the 16th century a Jesuit described it with a vault resting on 40 columns.