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Built on a hill overlooking the town, with a panoramic view of the hills around it, the Basilica do Senhor Bom Jesus de Matosinhos (Tues-Sun 6am-8pm) is set in a magnificent sloping garden studded with palms and what look like six tiny mosques with oriental domes. These are small chapels commemorating episodes of the Passion; each is filled with life-size statues dramatizing the scene in a tableau, 64 in all. Looking down on them from the parapets of the extraordinary terrace leading up to the church itself are twelve towering soapstone statues of Old Testament prophets. Everything, the figures and the statues, was sculpted by Aleijadinho , in what he must have known would be his last major commission. His leprosy was already advanced, and he could only work with chisels strapped to his wrists. The results are astonishing, a masterpiece made all the more moving by the fact that it seems likely it was a conscious swan song on Aleijadinho's part: there is no other explanation for the way a seriously ill man pushed so hard to finish such a massive undertaking, whose theme was immediately relevant to his own suffering. The whole complex is modelled on the shrine of Bom Jesus in Braga, in northern Portugal. The idea and money came from a Portuguese adventurer, Feliciano Mendes , who - towards the end of his life - planned to recreate the pilgrimage church of his native Braga, to house an image of the dead Christ he brought with him from Portugal in 1713. Mendes died in 1756, when work had only just begun, and it was forty years before the local bishop contracted Aleijadinho to produce the figures of the Passion and the prophets. Somehow, with his apprentices filling in fine detail, Aleijadinho managed to complete everything by 1805; it almost defies belief that the finished project was executed by a man who had lost the use of his hands.
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