To Visit the First Church of Nossa Senhora da Assunção - Alvito

The Church of Alvito - devoted to Nossa Senhora da Assunção and located in the Alentejo town of Beja - Manueline is a temple of great aesthetic beauty, built in the twelfth and fourteenth century and almost totally rebuilt in the XVI century.
Enhanced by foothills on the flanks, its façade is marked by powerful and solid granite giants of three floors and torn by gargoyles. These opens the portal Mannerist, consisting of round arch with columns pinnacles and crowned above by a triangular pediment, on which has the huge picture window of the choir, ending with gabled.
The various volumes outside the temple are marked by buttresses side with gargoyles, among which are open the windows of the temple. The ship axial is higher, supported by arches, botantes discharging the burden on the masses of the foothills. The capstone of the temple, and the highest axial nave, are covered by battlements beveled and framed, in some cases intervals of slender pinnacles. The stately bell tower rises above the threshold, with the capstone marked by pinnacles and coverage held by a spire.
The body of the church is divided into three naves, the central higher and wider, divided into four legs and developed transept, the latter marked by broken arch - as the side chapels (funerary chapel housing the tombs of the Lords of Alvito) and the triumphal arch - while the remaining would bear the full show. Maintain coverage of ogival arches cross, bearing the keys to the vaults of the center the Cross of Christ and other symbols. At the back of the church, on broad arches, is the choir loft.
In the nave is an elegant marble pulpit, classic lines and stanchions. On the walls of the aisles are several altars and gilded baroque, exposing several images of saints. This exuberant decoration fits with the coating, the half time, rugs tile standard of the seventeenth century (c. 1647) and the upper panels with the figuration of saints.
The chapel is covered by a vaulted ceiling with coffered, painted with seventeenth-century ornaments. It has mosaic tiles covering the walls, while the front of the altar is painted with a fresh composition - in which there is Pieta surrounded by angels, S. John and the Holy Women. The altarpiece start of a structure in marble and is a work in gilded Baroque Nacional. On the throne is the patron installment of this temple.
The Church of Alvito was classified as a National Monument (NM) in 1939.