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Viseu Cathedral — Viseu, PT

Viseu Cathedral, begun in the twelfth century and enlarged over many centuries, hides a sixteenth-century Manueline ceiling behind its massive granite front: the nave ribs are carved as twisted and knotted ropes, showing how Portugal in the Age of Discovery worked the imagery of the sea even into church vaults. The city was home to Vasco Fernandes, called Grão Vasco and counted the greatest Portuguese painter of the sixteenth century, and the altarpieces he made for this cathedral are now in the Grão Vasco Museum beside it. The two-storey cloister is Renaissance below and later above. Viseu has been the centre of its region since Roman times, and tradition places the burial of the Visigothic king Roderic nearby. Across the square the eighteenth-century Misericórdia church faces the cathedral, two fronts from different ages regarding each other.