Convent of Santa Monica and The Chapel of The Weeping Cross

This guide to the Convent of Santa Monica and the Chapel of the Weeping Cross in Goa opens on the night of February 8, 1636, when a nun praying before the altar cried out at what she saw in a painted crucifix. It traces the convent's founding in 1606 under Archbishop Aleixo de Menezes as Asia's largest nunnery, home to as many as 250 nuns, widows and well-born women who lived cloistered behind an iron grille, hidden from the congregation below. Word of that night reached the Portuguese viceroy, who rode over with the Bishop of Cochin days later to judge for himself, and the guide follows how Old Goa's own slow decline colored what people made of it afterward. Look for the choir grille still cut into the wall above the altar where the cross remains.