Igreja de Nossa Senhora da Conceição Velha

The Church of Nossa Senhora da Conceição Velha, in Lisbon, concentrates the memory of several churches in a single façade. The present building was born from the Pombaline reconstruction of the former Church of the Misericórdia, destroyed by the 1755 earthquake. That church had been the seat of the country’s first Misericórdia, a confraternity instituted in 1498 on the initiative of Queen Leonor and Frei Miguel Contreiras. In the 1770 rebuilding, led by Francisco António Ferreira with the collaboration of Honorato José Correia, surviving elements of the Manueline construction were incorporated. For this reason, the exterior preserves a richly ornamented portal, with a mullioned arch, armillary sphere, cross of the Order of Christ and a tympanum where Our Lady of Mercy shelters kneeling figures beneath her mantle. Inside the single nave, side chapels, tiles, 18th-century stucco and gilded woodwork extend the dialogue between devotion, catastrophe and reconstruction.