The New Cathedral of Coimbra, also called the Cathedral of the Holy Name of Jesus, stands in the upper town of Coimbra near the university. Groundbreaking took place in 1541, and it was built as the church of the Jesuit college founded in 1543. It was completed in the seventeenth century. The Marquis of Pombal banned the Jesuits from Portugal in 1759, and in 1772 the seat of the bishop moved here from the Old Cathedral.
The facade is rigid Mannerist in its lower part and Baroque above, finished in the early eighteenth century. Niches hold statues of four Jesuit saints, and two bell towers rise behind the facade. The interior is a single barrel-vaulted nave with side chapels and a domed transept.
It holds large gilt wood altarpieces from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and a Gothic-Manueline font by Pero and Felipe Henriques. The facade seems to have inspired a Jesuit church in Salvador, Brazil.
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