She founded the Mosteiro do Bom Jesus (Monastery of Good Jesus).
She was daughter of the knight Diogo Vaz Rodovalho and D. Maria Esteves Cansado, nobles from Viana. She was probably born in Viana in 1483, where she died at the age of 72, on 28^th July 1555.
Brites left her home at the age of 16 to retract with other women who preached poverty, chastity and prayer, not having professed as nuns, whom they called "the poor". They lived in their own houses located near Poço Novo (situated at the intersection of the present streets Miguel Bombarda and António Isidoro de Sousa).
She lived in this gathering for 13 years, but she wished to build a monastery dedicated to the Holy Name of Jesus. Therefore, she asked her father for her rightful inheritance, which she obtained in 1512, which consisted of lands, houses, slaves, furniture and books. We do not know which books, but there is one emblematic episode attributed to her adolescence that these books may have been part of. According to documental records of the 17^th century, when D. Brites was 15 years old, her father made a trip to Lisbon. Before leaving, he supposedly asked his daughter what jewellery, or any other gift, she wished him to bring to adorn herself. D. Brites would have replied that she was the wife of Jesus and that she wanted nothing more than the life of the said Lord. This is a first indication of her religious vocation. Her father would have satisfied her request by bringing some books on the life of Jesus. The documental reference to these books is vague, but it appears that they were still kept in the monastery in the 17^th century. We do not know to this day exactly which books they were, but given the indication that the subject was the life of Christ, as well as bibliographical availability of the time, it could be a three-volume copy of Vita Christi, by Ludolph of Saxony, one of the first books to be printed in Lisbon in Portuguese language, in the year 1495.
After receiving her dowry, D. Brites decided to retire herself in some houses she owned in the street of Poço Novo (present street Miguel Bombarda) where she bought others, with the purpose of founding a monastery, and there she lived with some maidens. The information seems to indicate that she began to live in a place other than the place where she had previously lived when she first left her parents' house at the age of 16, but always in the vicinity of Poço Novo.
Later D. Brites probably went to Lisbon, to the Princess D. Isabel’s palace, where her niece, D. Leonor Vaz Rodovalho, who would become Prince D. Luís’ maid, served. There she persuaded her niece to go and live with her in Viana. And it was Princess D. Isabel herself who recommended her integration in the monastery as she intended to establish in the Order of Saint Jerome.
For this purpose, for a life in community integrated in this Order, D. Brites will have moved to the monastery of Santa Maria de Belém, commonly known as Mosteiro dos Jerónimos, to ask for acceptance in the brotherhood of the Hieronymite Order. Thus, on 24^th February 1535, she was given the "conservatory in the temporal and the spiritual".
After the advance of her intents, with the conservatory’s acquisition, D. Brites will have returned to Viana, where she recollected in coenobitic monasticism, with more nieces and relatives, and sent to Rome the necessary permissions to "build a monastery and make a religion of professed women”, while asking permission to the "the royal people" for the same purpose.
However D. Brites continued to atend the palace of Princess D. Isabel, where she made a donation for the monastery’s foundation on 30^th April 1548. She donated houses, in the street of Poço Novo, where she had an oratory for the invocation of Jesus, and all her goods, furniture and livestock assets, rights and shares. As a counterpart, she demanded the position of superior of the monastery and when she could no longer exercise, that the position would pass on to her niece, Leonor Vaz Rodovalho, to other nieces or to any other relative who were in the monastery, the more eligible one. She also asked that, in the congregation, a mass would always be told on the first Friday of Lent for her soul and her father’s, her mother’s and other people she was in charge with.
As a result of her actions, Cardinal Infante D. Henrique, as archbishop of Évora, sent to Viana Father Frei Luís de Baessa, Castilian Jerome friar, to inquire about the life they led and he found it according to what was expected in a Religious House. At that time, there would be 11 women gathered there.
Thus, a Charter from Cardinal Infante D. Henrique, given in Évora on 21th February 1550, grants permission for the altar’s creation, to celebrate divine worship, and to erect a belfry with a bell.
A few years later the archbishop of Évora decided to accept the requests of D. Brites and sent the friar Luís de Baessa with provision to take them into obedience and make the religious women profess. In this provision, issued on 14^th July 1553, the Cardinal affirmed that D. Brites and the other religious women, in her house and monastery of the invocation of Jesus, had already been gathered for four years and had already received the religious habit from the hands of friar Luís. Thus, by this provision, the Cardinal accepted them under his authority and ordered the mentioned friar to accept the obedience and subjection of the pious women.
As a result, on 15^th July 1553, was celebrated in Viana a new foundation and donation charter made by Brites da Coluna - name by which Brites Dias Rodovalho became known in religion - and other religious women. This document is a confirmation of the intention already expressed in 1548, of the foundation of a monastery and the donation of her assets, being this gift now extended to the other women who professed in there. Now they wanted to live in rule and observance, according to the Statutes, Rules and Constitutions of the Order of Saint Jerome, a part of the nuns' Regulations, which had been made in the monastery of San Bartolomé de Lupiana, in the Archbishopric of Toledo. The donations were made by all those who wished to become religious women of the Order. And they offered the said goods and farms to friar Luís, who was present at the execution of the deed, by order of the cardinal, who accepted the nun’s donations.
The oath was made in the monastery’s church on 21th July 1553. In it they swore on the Holy Gospels that they wanted to live according to the Rules and Constitutions of the Order of Saint Jerome, pertaining to the nuns' Regulations; that they wanted to have Cardinal Infante as their superior, as was usual of the Archbishopric; and that they wanted to be under their regiment and their provincial prelates. Afterwards the friar gave them the Rule of Saint Augustine and the Constitutions of the Order of Saint Jerome, a conquest they have long desired.
The first sisters did not profess all at the same time. In 1553 only four did so, and on different days. D. Brites da Coluna was the fourth to profess.
The small size of the monastery of Jesus, of the same invocation of the particular oratory of the founder, impossible to expand because it was within the urban perimeter, and the eventual will to imitate Saint Jerome in his distancing from the world led D. Brites da Coluna to decide to build a new monastery outside of the village. Thus, the 1^st of August of 1554 is pointed as the day when the construction of the new monastery begun, by order of Cardinal Infante D. Henrique, in the dew of the gardens of Fonte Coberta.
D. Brites eventually suffered persecutions from noble relatives and from the people who wanted to oppose her intention and didn’t want to sell her the gardens and surrounding lands for the construction, so she bought the lands at a higher price than their real value, having thus spent much of her patrimony.
The nuns moved to the new monastery in 1560, already after the death of Brites da Coluna, in 1555, and the bones of its founder were transferred to the new building, where they were buried in the low choir, under the marble column that supports the high choir. This event has a symbolic meaning, considering the name adopted by the founder in religion (Coluna [Column]) and the fact that she was the spiritual column that built the monastery. She was buried, therefore, under the column that (still!) serves as foundation to the temporal work.
 

REFERENCES
Biblioteca Pública de Évora, Mosteiro do Bom Jesus de Viana do Alentejo, Lv.1.
Biblioteca Pública de Évora, Mosteiro do Bom Jesus de Viana do Alentejo, Lv.60.
Biblioteca Pública de Évora, Mosteiro do Bom Jesus de Viana do Alentejo, mç 122.
Biblioteca Pública de Évora, Cód. CV/1-26 (“Memórias” do Mosteiro do Bom Jesus de Viana do Alentejo).
FARRICA, Fátima, No Espaço e no Tempo: Contributos para a História das Instituições de Viana do Alentejo (Séculos XIV-XIX), Casal de Cambra, Caleidoscópio, 2015.