2nd Look at Evora

February 21, 2022

2nd Look at Evora

After all the driving for the past two days, I wanted to stay out of the car today. I took a look at the list of sites in Evora I hadn't seen and filled in those blanks. From the top -- Evora is home to Portugal's oldest Chapel of Bones, Constructed by Franciscan friars who wanted to make a provocative statement about the fragility of life, it has the phrase (translated for you) "We bones that are here await yours." Okay! I will post photos from the chapel at the end in case you want to just skip over them.

The church of St Francis, to which the chapel is attached, is huge and looks every bit of its 2014 renovation -- brightly painted outside and inside a mix of what was saved or salvaged of gothic and Moorish and baroque interior chapels from its original construction in the late 1400s and the subsequent cycles of build and destroy. Evora went through many changes of nationality -- including one I hadn't encountered in Portugal until today, France! -- each time suffering tremendous upheaval, violence and destruction. The main square in town, the Praca do Giraldo, celebrates Giraldo the Fearless, who expelled the Moors in the 1100s. Hundreds of years later, the square was a focal point for the Spanish Inquisition. History can be tough that way -- today's lovely spot to have coffee was yesterday's horror.

Evora's town hall, in a handsome old building, was undergoing excavation as part of plans to renovate in 1987, when archeologists discovered Roman thermal baths from the 2nd or 3rd century. This was just one floor below the main building floor. Incredibly cool.

Evora's Moorish quarter is anchored by a 1556 spherical fountain designed by the architect of the aqueduct. The buildings around the fountain have Moorish details and arches.

And I did walk a bit around the aqueduct as well. I have to say it's impressive (and disheartening?) to see how the aqueduct was kept intact but also integrated into development with houses and roads snug into the arches once the structure is inside the city walls. It was built in the 1500s and goes for 9 km into the countryside.

After all that walking around (oh, and I went into the very beautiful gardens in town, which have a lot of peacocks -- both male showoffs and pretty drab females, ugh, nature), I sat out in the square by the town hall and did a painting sketch of the view and afternoon light looking down the street from there. The sketch did not get off to a great start, as the first tube of paint I opened, naphthol red, basically exploded all over my hands. But I persisted.