Falperra Church or the Church of Santa Maria Madalena () is a
Baroque
The Baroque (, ; ) is a style of architecture, music, dance, painting, sculpture, poetry, and other arts that flourished in Europe from the early 17th century until the 1750s. In the territories of the Spanish and Portuguese empires including t ...
church located in the (serra da Falperra) Falperra mountains, outside of
Braga
Braga ( , ; cel-x-proto, Bracara) is a city and a municipality, capital of the northwestern Portuguese district of Braga and of the historical and cultural Minho Province. Braga Municipality has a resident population of 193,333 inhabitants (in ...
,
Portugal
Portugal, officially the Portuguese Republic ( pt, República Portuguesa, links=yes ), is a country whose mainland is located on the Iberian Peninsula of Southwestern Europe, and whose territory also includes the Atlantic archipelagos of ...
.
About
The church was built in the early 18th century, by order of the Archbishop D. Rodrigo de Moura Teles. It was a project by the leading Portuguese sculptor and architect
André Soares.
The
granite
Granite () is a coarse-grained (phaneritic) intrusive igneous rock composed mostly of quartz, alkali feldspar, and plagioclase. It forms from magma with a high content of silica and alkali metal oxides that slowly cools and solidifies undergro ...
retable-like frontage is exuberantly decorated. Particularly striking is the throne with
Saint Mary Magdalene
Mary Magdalene (sometimes called Mary of Magdala, or simply the Magdalene or the Madeleine) was a woman who, according to the four canonical gospels, traveled with Jesus as one of his followers and was a witness to his crucifixion and
resurr ...
, flanked by two small towers bearing the busts of
Saint Martha and
Saint Lazarus.
References
External links
{{Churches in Braga
Roman Catholic churches in Braga
Baroque church buildings in Portugal
National monuments in Braga District