Evora
Evora is an attractive little town with an excellent set of walls, a fine aqueduct and some decent roman ruins. We saw some of these ruins through windows in the market (just like in the market in Seville) and in the Town Hall, and walked round the (apparently mis-named) Temple of Diana (above) . We paid €1.50 each to go into the very eerie Chapel of Bones where the walls and columns are all made of the skulls and bones of old priests. We also walked beside part of the aqueduct where houses have been built into the arches.
As we strolled around town we saw a hotel called Timeless Charm. Sheila was so appalled that she immediately renamed it the Charmless Time. This has a much more honest ring to it.
The Orbitur campsite is only about 2km out of town which makes it an easy stroll into town. It also has free wifi.We had lunch in town in a tiny backstreet restaurant which was very popular with the locals, the main courses were €5.50 each. We tried our Portuguese on the waitress just to show willing, it is obviously not as explained in the "Earworm" language course as the waitress merged all the words together and dropped a few word endings along the way – fortunately most Portuguese can speak a certain amount of English.
Later in the week we went round the Cathedral (which we had missed earlier because it was closed for lunch – an odd concept for a Church), through the wifi-zone Public Garden with the Mudejar Ladies Gallery (Sheila is getting pretty nifty at identifying architectural styles – one look at the San Francisco Church and she immediately says ‘Manueline’) and a herd of about 25 Peacocks, down to the very attractive St Bras Church (which – surprisingly – doesn’t get a mention on the map from the Tourists Office), back up to the Temple of Diana and an excellent soup/sausage/cheese lunch at the market.
Some interesting youths camping on the camp site – all dressed in very formal dark suits (ties for the men, black stockings for the women) with long black capes . We saw some in town and reckon they are students at the local university – it is an old Jesuit college which perhaps accounts for the old-fashioned dress.
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At one time there were a lot of monasteries in and around Evora and a lot of space was being taken up with cemetaries containing deceased priests and so in order to make space it was decided to dig up the cemtaries and use the bones to make this chapel.
There is a similar chapel in Faro.
