A First Look at Evora

 

It took me 4 hours and three espressos to make it to Evora today from Porto.  I can report success with the taxi negotiations yesterday, as the taxi arrived at the exact time right at my door and helped me handle my luggage.  

I left Porto via the bridge closest to the ocean and the view from way up there was gorgeous.  But of course I could only glance that way.  Putting aside the length, the drive was easy and there was little traffic once I left Porto.

Needing to stretch out after being in the car, I took a walk around Evora and toured the Cathedral of Evora this afternoon.  The town is beautiful!  It's pretty much all white buildings with yellow/gold trim and it's got a lot of stores and restaurants.  There's a few very large public squares with a lot of cafes.  But to get the lay of the land, I went straight up a corkscrew staircase to the top of the tower of the Cathedral.  From there, you can see that beyond the town, there's a vast expanse of green where there's wine country and cork harvesting going on.  I have to explore that while I'm here!

And you also see from up there what the Roman walled town is hiding within --  ruins of a 1st century Roman temple.   You can't see the aqueduct from the tower, but there's also a very well preserved aqueduct on the sites-to-see list. 

But back into the church.  The cathedral is a huge 13th/14th century Roman-Gothic Building.  While there were many lovely things to see, I was completely taken aback by seeing the 14th century wooden doors, some of the oldest works in the building, with swastika cross doors. Nearby interpretation notes the lamentable association with its 20th century use.  That sent me looking up the Holocaust encyclopedia history of the swastika cross, and it does predate its use as a Nazi symbol by 7000 years.  Whoa, I knew that it certainly survives in decorative and religious uses from many centuries before the last one,  but I had to be reminded.  If nothing else, it's a significant reminder that keeping things like this in view can help educate and provide context.  

Opposite those ancient doors, there's a chapel that has on its keystone arch, a griddle -- the one that features in the story of Saint Lawrence, which was told in painted tile in the chapel in Almancil that I saw a couple of weeks ago (he was wrongly accused of keeping the king's money for his own gain and punished by being burned on a griddle).

I walked up closer to the Roman temple and back through the town, looking forward to a longer exploration in the next couple of days.