Mafra National Palace

The Mafra National Palace stands in the town of Mafra northwest of Lisbon, built between 1717 and 1755 under King John V of Portugal, its enormous cost financed largely by gold and diamonds flowing from Portugal's colony in Brazil. The complex combines a royal palace, a Franciscan convent housing hundreds of friars, and a domed basilica within a single vast Baroque and early Neoclassical building, making it one of the largest single religious-royal structures ever built in Europe. Its library, added later in the eighteenth century, holds tens of thousands of historic volumes and is one of the most significant surviving Rococo libraries in the world, still protected in part by a colony of bats that live behind its bookshelves and feed on insects that would otherwise damage the collection. The palace also holds two matched carillons of bells cast in the Low Countries, among the largest sets of historic carillon bells anywhere. UNESCO inscribed the Mafra palace complex as a World Heritage Site in 2019.