Igreja da Lapa

The Igreja da Lapa is a Catholic church in Porto, dedicated to Our Lady of Lapa. The style runs from late baroque to early neoclassicism: a symmetrical façade, a main nave and side chapels. The Brazilian priest Ângelo Sequeira began preaching across the city in the mid eighteenth century. A papal bull from Benedict XIV and the faithful's donations raised the first chapel in 1755. The brotherhood behind it decided a bigger church was needed and commissioned the architect José Figueiredo Seixas. His church took more than a century to finish, held back by scarce funds and the Napoleonic invasions. That same brotherhood later took a seminary and a hospital under its wing.

Beside the main altar, on the Gospel side, King Pedro IV's heart rests in a small monument by Costa Lima. The same man reigned in Brazil as Emperor Pedro I. He gave the heart to Porto in gratitude for its citizens' courage in the civil war against his brother Dom Miguel. It arrived in 1835, and its sarcophagus takes several keys to open. The heart's shape appears in Porto's old coat of arms and in the emblem of the city's football club. The church gained a monumental organ in 1995: thirty-two tonnes, fifteen metres tall and ten and a half metres wide. Its largest pipe is wooden and just over ten metres, and the organ ranks among the Iberian Peninsula's most impressive instruments. Concerts on it draw locals and visitors into the nave.

Next door lies the Cemetery of Our Lady of Lapa, Portugal's oldest romantic cemetery, a response to the cholera epidemics of 1833. The Irmandade da Lapa, whose statutes date from 1757, reserved the ground for its own members at first. Bourgeois families soon added tombs of their own, filling the ground with sculptures and mausoleums. Writers Camilo Castelo Branco and Soares de Passos lie here, alongside architects and artists such as Marques da Silva.