Architecture
The isolated castle is situated on a small hilltop overlooking the urban valley of Feira. Being a transitional castle, there have been many military adaptations to site's defences over the years.
Its plan is irregular oval, with protected entranceway, guarded by a barbican with moat and four addorsed rectangular watchtowers. On its southeastern corner are portions of a minor bastion, while opposite it, in the northwest is the hexagonal Baroque chapel. The walls, with small battlements, are circled by a parapet of large stone, with cruciform battlements and embrasures.
An arcade gate provides access to the compound and rectangular prison block tower, reinforced with watchtowers on its apexes, with a protected entrance via a patio. An arched door gives access to the buildings and the donjon, reinforced by square towers in wedge-shapes, with access protected by machicolations (providing coverage from three-floors) and is topped by a cradle vault, sectioned into four branches by arched corbels. The turrets are finished in small canonical cones with gables.
The chapel, located on the exterior wall adjacent to the main entrance, is a hexagonal-shape two-storey body, with a rectangular annex (itself consisting of a two story body with veranda window doors), both with tiled pivoted roofs, delimited on their extremities by corbels. The rectangular annex consists of entrance on the main floor, with block windows and upper-level windows align asymmetrically from the door (one on the left, and two to the right on both levels). Directly above this doorway is a bell-tower niche, surmounted by a cross.
The main chapel with an axial portal, consists of pilasters and corebls surrounding the main door, then gabled trim and a pronounced superior semi-circular pediment, which encircles an ocular hexagonal window. This Baroque era landmark, is marked by plain pilasters, wedges, and cyma line with angular pinnacles. The focused interior plan of the chapel includes five rounded arches that houses a central and two lateral alters. The pulpit is a basic with a hexagonal screen of wooden balusters.
Read more about this topic: Castle Of Santa Maria Da Feira
Famous quotes containing the word architecture:
“And when his hours are numbered, and the world
Is all his own, retiring, as he were not,
Leaves, when the sun appears, astonished Art
To mimic in slow structures, stone by stone,
Built in an age, the mad wind’s night-work,
The frolic architecture of the snow.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“The two elements the traveler first captures in the big city are extrahuman architecture and furious rhythm. Geometry and anguish. At first glance, the rhythm may be confused with gaiety, but when you look more closely at the mechanism of social life and the painful slavery of both men and machines, you see that it is nothing but a kind of typical, empty anguish that makes even crime and gangs forgivable means of escape.”
—Federico García Lorca (1898–1936)
“It seems a fantastic paradox, but it is nevertheless a most important truth, that no architecture can be truly noble which is not imperfect.”
—John Ruskin (1819–1900)