What to see in Setubal, one-day itinerary including the main monuments and places of interest, including the Church of the Gesù, Casa di Bocage and the Cathedral of Santa Maria delle Grazie.
Tourist information
Industrial and fishing town located near the mouth of the Sado river and not far from Lisbon, Setubal includes some valuable monuments, including the Church of the Jesus, a work built by the same architect on whose project the monastery de los Jeronimos was built.
This Gothic-style building with the addition of Manueline details shows an interesting marble frontispiece and, inside the remarkable 17th century azulejos.
To see the Church of San Julian, of the sixteenth century, and the fort erected during the same century, at the behest of King Philip I, with the aim of protecting the coastal strip from pirate attacks.
Other monuments include the Casa di Bocage, where the poet Manuel Maria Barbosa du Bocage was born, of which there is also a statue in the homonymous square.
The same building houses a municipal gallery reserved for temporary exhibitions.
What see
The Cathedral of Santa Maria delle Grazie, located in the center of the medieval village, was erected for the first time in the thirteenth century on a design by Antonio Rodrigues, later it was rebuilt in the high Renaissance period, between 1565 and 1570.
Equipped with an imposing mannerist façade, it contains columns, frescoes, sculptures and azulejos from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, all works of a certain value.
To the west of the city, in a dominant position is the Castle of San Filippo, a grandiose military construction characterized by a double wall building, built at the end of the sixteenth century.
In the chapel of the castle there are remarkable eighteenth-century azulejos.
In the Archaeological and Ethnophraphic Museum there is an archaeological section, containing evidence of the region, from the Paleolithic to the Roman era, and an ethnographic section, dedicated to traditional economic activities, such as fishing and weaving, as well as agricultural tools, ex voto and model boats .
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The Setubal Museum instead preserves paintings relating to Portuguese painters of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, panels and fragments of azulejos made in different centuries.
