In 1677 the Poor Clares left Santa Clara-a-Velha: the Mondego had been burying it in sand and water for more than three centuries. Today the river runs higher than the floor of the church.
From the two monasteries to the river, in one line. The terrain, the pit and the river measured today; the church floors at the levels the excavation found.
Cut the left bank along a line: from the top of Santa Clara-a-Nova, down the slope, along the church of Santa Clara-a-Velha, and straight on to the other side of the Mondego.
The old church sits in a pit. The floor you walk on in the monastery today is at 13.4 m above sea level; the street around it, at 19.0 m. The river runs at 17.8 m — above the monastery floor.
The monastery began in 1286, founded by Dona Mor Dias. Queen Isabel, wife of King Dinis, refounded it and finished the church, consecrated on 8 July 1330. She wished to be buried in it.
It stood on a gravel terrace laid down by the river itself. The stone paving of the nave lay at around 13 metres above sea level.
The floods came in during the winter of 1331, the year after the consecration. To keep the queen’s tomb safe, a chapel was built halfway up the church.
Since the 12th century the slopes of the Mondego had been cleared for farming, and the soil washed down into the river. The riverbed rose, and the floods rose with it. By the 15th century any flood reached the monastery. In the 16th century the floor was raised, at least in the choir, to 13.7 m.
In the time of Bishop Afonso de Castelo Branco, a new floor was laid along the whole length of the church and choir, on brick vaults, halfway up, by the window sills. Below it the old level was left, at the mercy of the floods.
A chronicler of the order wrote that they raised “outra Igreja, & outro coro de novo que se pudessem salvar das inundações do rio” — another church and another new choir that could be saved from the river’s floods.
It was not enough. On 29 October 1677, with the new monastery still unfinished, the Poor Clares moved to Santa Clara-a-Nova, at the top of the Monte da Esperança. Two days earlier the queen’s body had been carried up.
The floor of Santa Clara-a-Nova is at 65 m above sea level: 53 m above the paving of the old church, 315 m away from it.
In 1770 the ruins were leased out. The contract required the lower level of the church to be filled in, along with the pools where the cloister and the buildings had stood — “o pântano insalubre e infecto que ocupava o logar do mosteiro”, the unhealthy, foul swamp that occupied the site of the monastery.
The church survived. In the second half of the 19th century and the early 20th it was a granary, a store for farm tools and a cattle pen.
In 1959 a study by LNEC, the national civil engineering laboratory, noted that the lower floor of the church was below the level of the Mondego in the dry season. The river no longer needed floods to come in.
With the weir-bridge and the works to regulate the Lower Mondego, the water table rose, and the monastery was permanently flooded. The weir, of 1981, held the river in a permanent sheet of water.
So that it could be excavated, the monastery was enclosed in a cut-off wall of concrete and cement-bentonite, 16 to 24.8 m deep. Since 2004 it can be visited dry.
The surface of the river is 4.4 m above the floor you walk on. In chapter I, the Romans built the ground for their square. Here nobody built it: the river brought it.
Between 1543 and 1677, the religious houses on the banks of the Mondego left one by one, further away and higher up.
At the bottom of Rua Direita. Floods were already reaching it in the 14th century; in 1543 the new convent was begun, on the Rua da Sofia.
Documented[1]A house of canonesses regular, known as Celas da Ponte. In 1554 a poet saw it “a sumir-se, envolto de areia por todos os lados” — vanishing, wrapped in sand on every side. Abandoned in 1561.
Documented[1]By the bridge. In 1602 the friars began a convent higher up and further from the river; they moved seven years later.
Documented[1]The last. It climbed to the Monte da Esperança.
Documented[1]The Santa Clara bridge rose with the river. In 1513, King Manuel had a new one built on the piers of the old, with the deck some 5 m higher. Since Afonso Henriques’s bridge of 1132, the decks have risen at least 6 m.
Documented[2]In 1506, a papal bull authorised King Manuel to move the convents on the banks of the Mondego to more suitable sites: S. Francisco and S. Domingos could no longer be lived in when there was a flood.
Documented[1]The monastery can be visited.It is on Rua das Parreiras, on the left bank, near the Santa Clara bridge.
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