Capela das Almas

The two walls

The tiles cover the two façades that face the street — the short west front on Rua de Santa Catarina and the long north flank along Rua de Fernandes Tomás — about 360 square metres in all, in the blue-on-white of the eighteenth-century Portuguese tradition, painted in 1929. There are 15,947 of them, a figure the parish and every guide repeat from the same source. The panels are framed scenes with borders, the way a Baroque church interior would be tiled, turned inside out onto the street.

The subjects are the two saints the chapel serves. Saint Catherine of Alexandria, to whom the original wooden chapel on the site was dedicated, appears in her martyrdom; Saint Francis of Assisi, patron of the brotherhood that moved here from the Santa Clara convent at the end of the eighteenth century, appears in the scenes of his life and death. Walk the long flank from the corner and the panels read as a strip. The best-known single scene, on the Fernandes Tomás side, is the death of Saint Francis.

Who made them

The designs are by Eduardo Leite, a Porto painter working in the revival manner of the eighteenth century, and the tiles were fired at the Fábrica de Cerâmica Viúva Lamego in Lisbon, the factory whose own tiled façade on Largo do Intendente is a landmark in that city. That is the detail that matters for what you are looking at: this is not a Baroque survival like the cloister tiles of the Sé but a 1920s work in a Baroque style, contemporary with the tile panels of São Bento station (1905–1916) and the neighbouring Church of Santo Ildefonso (1932), and part of the same civic fashion for dressing Porto's public buildings in blue. Until 1929 the chapel's neoclassical exterior was plastered and painted white.

The site began with a wooden chapel dedicated to Saint Catherine, on what was then the edge of the city; Rua de Santa Catarina takes its name from it. At the end of the eighteenth century the Brotherhood of the Souls and Wounds of Saint Francis (Irmandade das Almas e Chagas de São Francisco) moved from the Monastery of Santa Clara to the chapel, brought the cult of the souls in purgatory with it — hence 'Capela das Almas', the Chapel of Souls — and decided to rebuild in stone. The present neoclassical building dates from that campaign and from expansion and restoration works in 1801; it stands in two sections, one lower than the other, which you can see on the Fernandes Tomás side where the roofline steps.

The façade on Santa Catarina has a framed door under a circular pediment with the arms of Saint Francis and Saint Catherine in the tympanum, a bell tower to the left with a balcony under an iron cross, and a nineteenth-century stained-glass window of the souls by the painter Amândio Silva. The tiles came in 1929 and the chapel has been the photograph on Rua de Santa Catarina ever since. It remains a working chapel of the parish of Santo Ildefonso, whose site publishes the hours and the Masses this page uses, and whose parish church three hundred metres down the hill is the other blue building on the street.

The interior is neoclassical and plain after the outside: a single nave, side altars, a gilded main altar with a large painting of the Ascension of the Lord by Joaquim Rafael, and the light from the west window of the souls. The side altars carry Our Lady of Fátima, the Sacred Heart, Our Lady of Sorrows, the Immaculate Conception and Saint John; the images of the saints are modern, the parish notes, apart from the eighteenth-century Nossa Senhora das Almas, which is the one to look for. There is no ticket, no turnstile and no shop; a donation box is by the door and nobody watches it.

Etiquette is the usual for a working church, and it matters here more than in a museum-church like São Francisco: the chapel is used for Mass at least four times every day and for weekday evening Mass too, so an interior visit at 09:15 walks into a service. Wait outside until the congregation leaves, keep phones silent, no flash, and leave the front pews to the people praying. The churches hub has the same rules for the Sé, the Clérigos church and the rest.

The chapel opens at 07:30 every day. Monday to Friday it stays open until 17:30 with Mass at 08:00, 09:00, 10:00, 12:00 and 17:00; Saturday it closes at 12:30, reopens 16:30–17:30, and has Mass at 08:00, 09:00, 10:00, 12:00 and 17:30; Sunday and holy days it is open 07:30–12:30 with Mass at 08:00, 09:00, 10:00 and 12:00. Each Mass runs roughly half an hour, so the practical windows for a look at the interior are between about 10:30 and 11:45 on any day, and on weekdays from about 12:30 through to 16:45. Sunday afternoon the chapel is closed and only the walls are on view.

Wikipedia prints longer hours, to 19:00 on some days; the parish page does not, and the parish page wins. No holiday closures are stated. The Monday closures page is the reminder that Monday, which shuts the museums, does nothing to the chapel — it is open its full weekday hours.

The table sets the opening hours beside the Mass times for each day, so the quiet windows are visible without arithmetic.

Metro: Bolhão station (lines A, B, C, E and F — every line except D) has its exit on Rua de Fernandes Tomás beside the market; the chapel is one block east, on the corner. A Z2 single on an Andante card is $1.63 (€1.40) for an hour, the 24-hour Z2 title $6.22 (€5.35), and the card itself $0.70 (€0.60) once. From the airport, line E to Trindade and one stop on to Bolhão on a Z4 title at $2.67 (€2.30), about half an hour — the airport page has the times.

On foot: from São Bento station, climb Rua 31 de Janeiro to Praça da Batalha and walk the whole length of Rua de Santa Catarina — the Majestic Café at number 112, the market at the Fernandes Tomás crossing, the chapel at 428 — about fifteen minutes uphill. From the Aliados avenue it is ten minutes east through the Baixa.

By bus: any STCP bus to Bolhão or Rua de Sá da Bandeira; onboard ticket $2.91 (€2.50), cards accepted on every bus. The heritage tram line 22, when it runs, loops from Carmo through Batalha and stops near the foot of the street; it is $6.97 (€6) and not on any Andante title.

The five approaches compared by fare and by how far you still walk; every one of them ends on the same corner, and the getting around page explains the Andante card that makes the metro fares cheaper.

- The tiles are younger than the Majestic Café. They went up in 1929; the café down the street opened in 1922. Until then the chapel was white plaster. (Wikipedia, Chapel of Santa Catarina, citing Guerra 2010) - They were made in Lisbon, not Porto. Eduardo Leite designed them and the Viúva Lamego factory in Lisbon fired them — the same factory whose tiled front on Largo do Intendente is a Lisbon landmark.

(Wikipedia, Chapel of Santa Catarina) - The 'Souls' are the souls in purgatory. The brotherhood that moved here from Santa Clara at the end of the eighteenth century was the Brotherhood of the Souls and Wounds of Saint Francis, and the cult of the souls gave the chapel the name everyone uses. (Wikipedia, Chapel of Santa Catarina) - The parish hours are shorter than the ones on Wikipedia. Santo Ildefonso's timetable page gives 17:30 on weekdays and 12:30 on Sunday; the encyclopaedia entry prints 19:00 on some days. Plan by the parish.

(santoildefonso.org/horarios, read in Q3 2026) - There are four Masses every morning, including Sunday. 08:00, 09:00, 10:00 and 12:00 — which is why an interior visit at half past the hour works and one on the hour does not. (santoildefonso.org/horarios, read in Q3 2026)

It is a ten-minute stop on the Santa Catarina morning, and the order matters. Coffee at the Majestic Café at 09:00, the Bolhão market as the stalls fill, the chapel's tiles in the eastern light before 10:00 and its interior at 10:30 once the third Mass is out; then down through Batalha to São Bento and the Sé for the rest of the morning. Do it on a weekday: on Sunday the café and the market are shut and only the chapel is open, until 12:30.

On a Monday it is one of the things that does not close — see the Monday closures page — and on a wet day the walk is short enough between shelters that the rainy-day page keeps it. The one-day itinerary gives the corner five minutes on the way to the market; the two-day plan gives the street a slower morning of its own.