St Bernardino (convent)

This was the first convent founded on this island outside Funchal. It belonged to the Franciscan order and was dedicated to St Bernardine of Siena, one of the order's great saints. It stood in the parish (freguesia) of Câmara de Lobos (‘seals’ den’), in a remote and solitary lugar (settlement ranking between a town and a parish), some distance from the mother church (igreja matriz). Its origins were humble and obscure, but it later became celebrated and renowned throughout the island, and it seems even in mainland Portugal, the Kingdom (reino, i.e. mainland Portugal), because a man of outstanding virtue named Friar Pedro da Guarda lived and died there, whom the people called, and still call, the Holy Servant of God. For this reason it became a magnet for many devotees and pilgrims, who came from the most distant places on the island to invoke the intercession of the saintly and humble Franciscan. With the extinction of the religious orders and the stance taken by the vicar capitular and governor of the diocese (governador do bispado, administering the see in the bishop's absence), António Alfredo de Santa Catarina Braga, these acts of devotion and piety cooled and dwindled. They did not die out entirely, however, for every year a considerable number of people still visit the grave in which the mortal remains of Friar Pedro da Guarda were laid. We say nothing more here about his life, his virtues and the veneration paid to him, since we shall devote a separate article to him.

Friar Gil de Carvalho, a humble Franciscan friar, came to Madeira from mainland Portugal just as the religious who had occupied the Hospício de São João (St John's Hospice) were leaving the island to establish a community near Lisbon. According to the annotator of the ‘Island History’ (Historia Insulana), Friar Gil, wishing to live as a hermit in a deserted place, built a small cenobium with two cells, occupied by João Afonso and Martinho Afonso, who went begging among the settlements to support all three.

As the number of religious grew, they set about building a small convent on land donated to them by João Afonso Correia, squire to Prince Henry the Navigator, and his wife Inês Lopes, who on this island were the founders of the house of Torre Bela. The new house stood in a spot far from the settlement, bounded on one side by the stream and on the other by a cliff, and it was well suited to the way of life to which they had devoted themselves. Some years later other religious joined them, forming a community under the direction of Friar Gil de Carvalho.

Many years later, Friar Gil handed over the governance of his monastery to Friar Jorge de Sousa, who did much to enlarge it. Some years earlier a flood of the stream had destroyed the small church and part of the convent. Friar Jorge built a new and larger church, sheltered from the stream's torrents, and, after considerably improving the monastery's material conditions, gave the community the canonical organisation of a true monastic house.

The chancel of the new church was founded by Rui Mendes de Vasconcelos, son of Martim Mendes de Vasconcelos and of Helena Gonçalves, Zarco’s daughter, together with his wife Isabel Correia, daughter of the donors of the land on which the original convent had stood. João Bettencourt de Vasconcelos, grandson of the founder of this chancel and its patron, entailed the disposable third (terça) of the estate of his property to meet the needs of the convent, by a will approved on 12 December 1607. Of him we read in an old nobiliary: ‘…they called him the Cavalleiro [the Knight] by nickname; he was born in the year 1535 and went to India in 1580 as captain of the carrack São Gregorio; he succeeded to the thirds of his grandparents on the death of his brother Ruy Mendes, and made a will approved on 12 December 1607, in which he left his third entailed on the lands above Camara de Lobos and below the Quinta da Torre, and left it to the friars of São Bernardino, of whose chancel he was patron, as heir to the entail (morgado) of his said maternal grandparents, its founders; he died on 12 July 1615’.

The chancel of this convent’s church was the private family vault of the descendants of its founders and patrons, and many of them were buried there, above all the successors to the entailed house (casa vinculada).

The convent church, which still stands, although badly ruined, bears the date 1763 carved high on its façade; this is certainly the date on which the church was rebuilt.

As already stated, the church was enlarged and rebuilt in 1763. Left utterly abandoned after the expulsion of the religious orders, however, it fell rapidly into ruin, and it was completely restored a few years ago thanks to the diligent efforts of the parish priest of Câmara de Lobos, João Joaquim de Carvalho. The outbuildings of the former conventual house were also restored at the same time, and from 1931 to 1933 they housed the classes of the first years of the preparatory course of the minor diocesan seminary, which was later abolished and incorporated into the Seminary of the Encarnação (Seminário da Encarnação; Incarnation).