The Assembly of the Republic of Portugal is based in the Sao Bento Palace. It is a late Baroque building with a wide facade decorated with a column portico and tympanum. In front of the building there is a square with a fountain.
The seat of the Congregation was a Benedictine monastery in the Middle Ages. Destroyed in a great earthquake in 1755, it was rebuilt in the Baroque style. The monks moved out of here in the nineteenth century on the wave of dissolution of monasteries and their transfer to public purposes. Then the adaptation of the monastery to the needs of state institutions began.
The monastery refectory was rebuilt into a meeting room. It burned down in 1895. The reconstruction works lasted until the 1940s. At that time, the building's facade was also changed, adding a neoclassical portico with columns and a tympanum, in which a bas-relief referring to Portuguese history was placed.
Attractions inside
