The Hieronymites were a monastic order that followed Saint Jerome, and King Manuel I gave them a very grand home. He ordered the monastery built on the riverbank at Belém in 1501, on the site of a small chapel founded by Henry the Navigator, to serve as a royal pantheon and a place where monks would pray for sailors and for the king's soul, and it took most of a century to complete. The architects João de Castilho and Diogo de Boitaca worked in the Manueline style, and the south portal, a mass of carved saints and canopies, and the cloister, with its twisting columns and nautical motifs, are among the finest pieces of late Gothic in Europe.
The church inside is calm after the exuberance of the portal, with tall, slender pillars like palm trees holding a star-patterned vault. The tombs include that of Vasco da Gama, who opened the sea route to India in 1498, and of the poet Luís de Camões, who wrote the epic about that voyage, The Lusiads. The modern poet Fernando Pessoa is also buried here, moved in 1985 to this national shrine. The monks stayed until 1834, when religious orders were abolished in Portugal, after which the building served as an orphanage and school.
The ride list pairs it with the Convent of Christ at Tomar, a very different building, the headquarters of the Knights Templar in Portugal and later of the Order of Christ, whose cross appears on the sails of the caravels. The road from Lisbon to Tomar runs about an hour and a half north through the Ribatejo, a country of olive groves, vineyards and wide fields along the Tagus, with plenty of quiet roads.
In Belém the street plan is easy, though it can be busy at weekends. Bikes can usually be parked in the car parks near the monastery and along the river, and the district has fuel and cafes. The queue for the monastery church and cloister can be long, but it moves.
Go in the late afternoon if you can, when the light comes through the cloister arcades and the crowd thins, and take a moment to look at the stone vines and ropes on the capitals, each one slightly different.