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Tourist Sights: Santa Maria Maior |
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The Medieval Town - The Museum - The Hot Springs - The Castle - The Forts - Santa Maria Maior Church - Misericordia and Madalena - Azinheira Church - Rural Chapels - Vidago - Monforte Castle and Bolideira RockA Word About the Churches And Santa Maria Maior
Santa Maria Maior (photo by J.B. Cesar)Chaves
is not a city of imposing churches.
Tras os Montes was, and still is, one of the poorest regions in
Portugal, which is one of the poorest countries in Europe.
With the exception of the baths and the bridge crossing the Tâmega
this was not a place of extensive Roman settlement.
The Douro River, with difficult passage and navigability,
effectively cut off the region from the more fertile and settled areas.
After the relative splendor of the Roman period the town fell
into almost total decadence and possible abandonment at different times
during the barbaric invasions, the Moorish conquest, and the subsequent
Christian reconquest under Afonso Henriques. This
was not a region—during the great age of church building in the middle
ages-- where enough money could be generated to have a surplus to spend
on churches. There were not
wealthy nobles or guilds that were willing to build churches with
funeral chapels for their most important members.
Little commerce other than cattle fairs and selling of foodstuffs
in the weekly fair must have taken place.
Unlike the Spanish meseta with
its vast sheep herds or its wheat fields, generating great Medieval
fairs, like the one in Medina del Campo, and producing enough wealth to
build impressive cathedrals like those of León, Burgos, Valladolid, and
even Zamora, this peripheral region lived mainly from a primitive system
of agriculture and herding. Even
the wealth generated by the pilgrims on their way to Santiago de
Compostela, passed farther to the north.
Curiously too, in such a religious country, there is not one
monastery or convent still in operation in Chaves or even in all of
Tras-os Montes. Until the
beginning of the twentieth century there were two religious houses in
town, a Franciscan monastery in the São Francisco Fort and a convent in
the center where the public high school
is now located. Chaves
was essentially a town that had little contact with its northern
neighbor Galicia and perhaps less with the populated coast of Portugal.
To the north was one of the poorest regions of Spain—the
interior of Galicia—with rugged mountains and infertile soils.
Verín across the border was as poor as Chaves.
To the east there was more rugged terrain--to the west, likewise.
The mountains of Marão cut the region off from the populated and
relatively fertile coastal plain. A
trip to Porto took half a day even with tarmac roads. While
in the eighteenth century Chaves boasted 26 churches and chapels—although
many were very simple structures—today we can point out three
important churches in the town itself. Santa
Maria Maior is what passes for a cathedral in the town, even though
Chaves long ago lost its bishopric to Vila Real.
To find the last bishop we have to go back to the fifth century
when Odacio, a Roman bishop for more than 40 years, related in the Chronicon
the Suevian invasions of the northwest of the Iberian Peninsula.
Later, Frumario, a barbarian king who destroyed the city, made
him prisoner. Released, he
returned to his church, which had been severely damaged.
But he couldn’t prevent the temple being demolished by the
Visigoths. After
the Arabic occupation in 716 there was no longer a bishopric in Chaves. Construction
dates to the year 1100 and the church is Romanesque in the main door and
the bell tower with two bells. In
the sixteenth century renovations in the Renaissance style took place,
completely modifying the church, and additional restoration took place
in 1968. Unfortunately, due
to paving a square in front and on the sides, the church looks to the
observer to have been partially buried.
Today
it conserves its Romanesque style—solid granite blocks and austere--
broken only by the side door of elegant proportions with busts of Saint
Peter and Saint Paul. The
interior, described as poor in a 1960 encyclopedia, has only slightly
improved. There are three
naves separated by 4 cylindrical columns, on which are 8 arches.
A stone-ribbed dome
covers the main chapel. The
walls of undecorated stone lend an air of austerity not helped by the
unpainted oak ceiling, which supports the roof.
Fortunately the stained glass windows allow the entrance of some
light into the building.
The Medieval Town - The Museum - The Hot Springs - The Castle - The Forts - Santa Maria Maior Church - Misericordia and Madalena - Azinheira Church - Rural Chapels - Vidago - Monforte Castle and Bolideira Rock
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