Palace of Mafra

Stand still for a moment and look along the facade. It runs so far to the left and to the right that your eyes have to travel to take it in. Pale stone, warm in the sun, cool in shadow. Above you, two bell towers rise on either side of a church dome. If you arrive at the right hour, you may hear the bells before you see them. A cascade of notes drops across the square and fills the small town around you.

This is the Palace of Mafra, or more exactly, the Royal Building of Mafra. It is not one building but several in one. There is a royal palace, a basilica, and a Franciscan convent, all joined under a single roofline. The front stretches for more than two hundred metres. Inside, there are said to be more than a thousand rooms. It is one of the largest Baroque buildings in Portugal, and in 2019 it was added to the UNESCO World Heritage list.

The story begins with a king and a promise. In the early eighteenth century, King John the Fifth ruled Portugal. According to the most popular account, he made a vow to God. If his queen, Maria Anna of Austria, gave him an heir, he would build a convent for the Franciscan friars at Mafra. Some versions say the vow followed an illness instead. The heir came, and the king kept his word... on a scale nobody had expected.

Work began in 1717. What started as a modest convent for a small group of friars grew, year after year, into this enormous complex. The king kept enlarging the plans. The design came from a German-born architect, Johann Friedrich Ludwig, known in Portugal as João Frederico Ludovice. He had worked as a goldsmith and had spent time in Rome. You can see Roman influence in the basilica front, with its columns, statues, and central dome.

How could a small kingdom afford something like this? The answer lies across the Atlantic. In this period, Portugal drew huge quantities of gold from its colony in Brazil. That gold paid for Mafra. Tens of thousands of workers came here at the height of construction. They cut and carried stone, raised scaffolding, and lived in temporary camps around the site. The basilica was consecrated in 1730, with the king present, though work continued for years afterwards.

That human cost has not been forgotten. The Portuguese writer José Saramago, who later won the Nobel Prize in Literature, set his novel known in English as Baltasar and Blimunda during the construction of Mafra. In his book, the palace is not only a royal triumph. It is also a story of labourers, accidents, and ordinary lives bent to one man's ambition. Many Portuguese readers think of that novel when they see this facade.

Now turn your attention to the basilica at the centre. Step inside, and the noise of the square falls away. The interior is cool and quiet, lined with marble in shades of white, pink, grey, and soft yellow. Much of this stone came from quarries in the region around Lisbon. Look up into the dome, and let your eyes follow the lines of the stone upward. Here is the first surprise: this church holds not one organ, but six.

The six organs were designed to play together. On special occasions, their sound fills the whole church from several directions at once. Very few churches in the world have anything like it. Even when they are silent, look for them around the crossing, where the long nave meets the arms of the church. Their pipes and gilded cases stand high above the floor, like balconies for music.

Then there are the bells. Each of the two towers holds a carillon, a large set of tuned bells that can play melodies. Together they hold ninety-two bells, ordered from workshops in Flanders, in today's Belgium. Locals tell a story that the founders doubted the king could pay for so many. The king, so the tale goes, answered by doubling the order. It is a legend, but it fits the spirit of the place.

The second surprise waits in the library. Visitors often call it the finest room in the building. It is long, bright, and lined with Rococo bookcases in pale wood. The shelves hold around thirty-six thousand volumes, collected over centuries. And here is the detail most people miss: a colony of small bats lives in the library. At night, they fly out and eat the insects that would otherwise damage the old paper and leather bindings.

The bats are not a myth. Staff have known about them for a long time, and the furniture is often covered at night to protect it from droppings. You will not see them during the day. But knowing they are there changes the room. This quiet hall of books depends on a living, nightly guard that works in the dark, above your head.

Walk on through the royal apartments, and you will notice how long the corridors are. The king's rooms sat at one end of the building and the queen's at the other, linked by a passage that runs along the front. Mafra was not a full-time home. The royal family came here for hunting in the nearby Tapada, a large walled park, and for religious feasts. Much later, in October 1910, the last king of Portugal, Manuel the Second, spent his final night in the country here. The next day he left for exile from the beach at Ericeira, on the coast nearby.

As you leave, stop again in the square and look back. The stone is the same pale colour you saw when you arrived, but now you know what stands behind it. A promise, a fortune in gold, thousands of workers, six organs, a library guarded by bats. Listen for the bells. Notice the small cafés and the ordinary houses of Mafra, sitting quietly in the shadow of this vast building. The town grew around the palace, and it still lives beside it today.