Museu Regional de Beja

The Museu Regional de Beja occupies the 15th-century Convento de Nossa Senhora da Conceição, one of the best-preserved late Gothic convents in Portugal. The building itself is the main reason to visit: the cloister is a serene space of Manueline arches and blue and white azulejo tiles, and the Baroque chapel glitters with gilded woodwork. The convent church's ceiling and walls are covered in extraordinary panels of late-medieval tiles, among the finest in the country.

The museum's collection is solid rather than spectacular: Roman mosaics and artefacts from the surrounding Alentejo, medieval religious art, and ethnographic pieces from local rural life. The Roman collection is particularly worth attention — Beja stands on the site of Pax Julia, an important Roman town, and the excavations of the region have yielded fine mosaic floors and sculpture.

Allow an hour and a half for the museum, and don't rush the cloister.

things to do museum
A story
The convent has a romantic footnote in Portuguese literary history. In the 17th century a young nun named Mariana Alcoforado lived here and allegedly wrote passionate letters to a French officer she had fallen in love with. The "Letters of a Portuguese Nun" became a celebrated early example of epistolary literature, though scholars still debate whether Mariana was truly their author.