Evora, Portugal

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"Life is what we make of it. Travel is the traveler. What we see isn't what we see but what we are."
-Fernando Pessoa

Note: This is the second half of a two-part series on Portugal. You can read the first post here.

It was my last full day in Portugal, having only arrived in Lisbon less than 48 hours earlier. I had come to this beautiful country to celebrate my 42nd birthday, which all fans of Douglas Adams will immediately understand the significance of, and which everyone else can Google if they’re curious.

On this rainy morning, I boarded a FlixBus bound for the ancient town of Evora, an hour and a half drive East from Lisbon. The previous day, I had spent longer than that getting to the tourist hotspot of Sintra, which is just outside the capital. By contrast, Evora is over 138 kilometers distant from Lisbon, tucked away deep within the interior of Portugal, a world away from the Atlantic coast and the hustle and bustle of city life.

Surrounded by an impressive Roman wall and a millennia-old system of aqueducts, this sleepy town of white buildings and narrow cobblestone streets feels like it exists outside of time. I chose to come here because this was my first trip to Portugal and I didn’t know when or if I’d ever be back, so I wanted to experience more than just one city. Looking back, it was the best decision I made during the entire trip. I absolutely fell in love with Evora!

The history of Evora spans more than 5,000 years. It was the capital of a confederacy of Celtic tribes until it was conquered by the Romans in 57 BCE. The Romans expanded the town and built a number of structures that are still there today, including the aqueducts, the oldest part of the city walls, the Temple of Diana, and a bathhouse.

After the fall of the Roman Empire, Evora went through the same cycle of invasions and occupations that Lisbon did, as the city fell first to the Visigoths, then to the Moors, and finally to the fledgling Catholic kingdom of Portugal. Each wave of occupants left a lasting mark on Evora and its architecture, which is much better preserved than most of Lisbon because Evora was spared the destruction wrought by the 1755 earthquake that I mentioned in the previous post. Walking around Evora feels like walking through history (if you ignore the occasional cars and mobile phone stores you might encounter from time to time).

Unsurprisingly, the town is a UNESCO World Heritage site. Much more surprising is that there were relatively few tourists there when I visited. In fact, I didn’t see a ton of locals either. Granted, Portugal is definitely not what you would call an “early to bed, early to rise” kind of country, but when I first arrived at the city gate around 10:30 AM, the town seemed downright abandoned. I spent about 15 minutes checking out the ancient Roman aqueducts from a street lined with homes and businesses, and I only saw two other people the entire time, both of whom seemed to just be passing through and not there to see the aqueducts. As it got later in the day and I got to the center of town, the number of people around did increase, but it was never crowded by any stretch of the imagination. Contrast this with Sintra, which takes just as long to get to from Lisbon via public transportation, has no Roman ruins (as far as I know), and is so overrun with tourists in some parts that you might as well be in the center of Rome or Paris. Don’t get me wrong: Sintra is still totally worth visiting, but it’s incredible to me that Evora had so few visitors, considering all the town has to offer.

After seeing the aqueducts, I walked down narrow cobblestone alleys and only slightly less narrow main streets until I arrived at the Pateo de São Miguel (St. Michael’s Patio) in the historic center of the town. The patio is part of a cluster of historic buildings, most notably a handsome white palace (Paço de São Miguel) built in the 12th century. The palace did not appear to be open to the public at the time, but the patio–which sits on a hill–was also a great vantage point for taking in a view of Evora and the surrounding countryside. I continued to wander around the historic center at a very relaxed pace, admiring vine-covered stone walls, old churches, convents and monasteries.

Eventually I reached one of Evora’s oldest structures, the ruins of the Temple of Diana, built by the Romans in the first century CE. The Iberian peninsula, along with the rest of the Roman Empire, converted to Christianity a few centuries later, and indeed the hulking Cathedral of Evora was later built right next to the ruins–at a higher elevation, so the staunch Catholics of Evora could literally look down on this pagan temple. Nonetheless, the well-made Corinthian columns have survived the initial conversion to Christianity, the invasion of the Visigoths, centuries of Islamic rule, and everything else that’s happened since then. I’ve been to Rome, so I’ve seen much larger and more grandiose Roman ruins, but the sight of this relic from the past in the middle of Portugal definitely made an impression on me.

Before visiting the big cathedral, I paid a small fee to enter a private church called São João Evangelista (St. John the Evangelist). Built in 1485 on the ruins of an Arab castle, the interior walls of this church are covered with beautiful blue and white painted tiles depicting Biblical and historical scenes. A number of Portuguese royals and high government officials are buried here, and there are even windows in the floor revealing the bones of monks and an Arabic cistern from the castle that used to be there.

São João is basically just around the corner from the main cathedral, but after dealing with rain on and off all weekend, I was suddenly subjected to what might have been the most powerful downpour I’ve ever been caught in. I was wearing my rain jacket and already soaking wet, but the rain came down so hard that I literally couldn’t keep walking through it and the insides of my shoes were quickly filling up with water. I felt like I was walking through a waterfall that never ends. I was actually at the cathedral by this time but in the back of the building where there was no open entrance. So I took shelter under the eaves of the church until the rain slowed down a little.

Once I got into the Cathedral, I wasn’t able to walk around in the main part of the church because Sunday Mass was in session. But I bought a ticket to see the attached monastery, treasury, and museum. My ticket also granted me access to the roof, although I doubted that I would be able to go up there due to the rainstorm. However, I lucked out and the rain subsided at just the right time for me to explore the rooftop before the rain started up again.

The large roof of the cathedral contains a belltower and several other structures, but it’s the view of the city and of the monastery courtyard below that commands one’s attention here. After admiring the view for a while, I went back inside and explored the halls of the monastery. By this time, the rain had already started up again and was bombarding the open courtyard and even spraying through the high windows of the hall.

Next I saw the Treasury, home to some very interesting (and sometimes gruesome) relics. Photos are not allowed here, but the collection contained everything from jewel encrusted golden crucifixes worth a fortune to statues of saints and martyrs that contained bones, teeth, or scraps of clothing supposedly from the person whose likeness the statue bears. There was even a fascinating medieval statue of Mary that could be opened up to convert into a different sculpture like a Transformer.

By now, Mass was over, and I returned to the main part of the church to appreciate the decor. Evora Cathedral, more properly called the Basílica Sé de Nossa Senhora da Assunção (Basilica Cathedral of Our Lady of Assumption), is the largest medieval cathedral in all of Portugal. It was built in the late 12th and early 13th centuries, and improved in the 1400s. It is a truly impressive building and would be well worth the visit even if it hadn’t been adjacent to an ancient Roman ruin.

By this time, it was well into the afternoon and I needed to find something to eat, not to mention rest, dry off, and charge my phone. The first restaurant I attempted to enter was actually booked all day, which shocked me since I had hardly seen anybody around since I arrived in Evora. Maybe everyone was hiding out in this restaurant the whole time. Nonetheless, it wasn’t long before I found a welcoming restaurant serving typical Portuguese food without any wait. Lured inside by a sign about a local traditional tomato soup, I was disappointed to be told that the tomato soup contains meat (I thought it might be some variation on gazpacho). But I quickly cheered up when my server brought me a delicious platter of pan-fried mushrooms in a tasty vegan garlic sauce, a side of bread and olives, and a glass of red wine. The food was great, as was the server and the general atmosphere. The combination of thick linen tablecloths and dark wood paneling gave me a warm feeling of nostalgia and for some reason conjured up childhood memories of spaghetti dinners at my grandmother’s house, even though it looked nothing like this restaurant. It just felt “homey” in some undefinable way.

After lunch–and after a brief stop in the town’s stately central plaza (Praça do Giraldo)–I visited one of the most fascinating–and creepiest–places in Evora: The Chapel of Bones. Inside the 13th century Royal Church of St. Francis is a room that used to be the dormitories and reflecting room of an order of Franciscan monks. In the 1600s, faced with a shortage of available burial space in Evora, some of the monks took it upon themselves to find a creative solution to the problem. They converted the room into a chapel built out of the bones of their monastic brothers and other dearly departed members of St. Francis parish. Although the actual load-bearing structures are constructed of more traditional materials, almost all the surfaces of the chapel are covered in bones, laid out in well-designed patterns. The pillars are embedded in towers of skulls and above the door is a chilling inscription that reads “Nós ossos que aqui estamos, pelos vossos esperamos.” (“We bones are here, waiting for yours.”). Although I have been to Paris, I never visited the Catacombs, so I’ve never seen anything like the Chapel of Bones before. It was creepy and uncomfortable but also strangely beautiful. The monks who built it wanted visitors to reflect on their mortality and the transient nature of this life. After staring into the empty eye sockets of a thousand skulls, it’s kind of hard not to.

The Chapel of Bones was the last of the “must see” stops I had planned to visit in Evora, but I still had a couple hours until my bus would depart for the return trip to Lisbon. So I wandered around the back streets of Evora, passing by closed churches and botanical gardens that had been reduced to mud pits by the relentless rain.

To escape from that rain for a while and wait for my bus, I ducked into a soccer bar on the edge of town and ordered a tall mug of Super Bock black stout. Earlier in my trip I was pleasantly surprised to discover that stout and dark beer were popular in Portugal. Since Portugal is a wine-centric country, I expected their beer to be light and bland. But I’m happy to say I was wrong. Even in a sports bar catering to average locals in a provincial old town, stout is on tap. It was cheap yet tasty and it warmed my bones, which–thanks to the cold rain–had been getting almost as cold and dreary as the ones I saw in the chapel. I sipped my extra large stout slowly and watched the rain through the glass door.

Finally, it was time to return to Lisbon. When the bus returned me to the city, it was dark out–and still raining. I thought about just eating dinner at my hotel’s restaurant, but there wasn’t much I could eat on their dinner menu, so I walked a few blocks further east and found a great restaurant with umbrella-covered seating in the middle of a car-free street. I ordered a vegetarian paella. My server brought the paella out in a sizzling skillet and I very much enjoyed my last dinner in Portugal. I was worried that the flavor would be bland because it included things like peas and carrots, but it was perfectly spiced and delicious–not super spicy but just enough of a kick to banish any hint of blandness.

The next morning I got up before dawn and took the bus to the airport. (The Metro didn’t start running until a little later.) The streets were utterly empty but the bus was full of people who I gathered were probably nightshift workers on their way home from work. My flight home was uneventful aside from the sick seat-neighbor I mentioned in the previous post.

Since booking this trip to Portugal to take advantage of a great ticket price, I had several moments where I almost regretted the purchase, not the least of which was on the night of my departure, driving to the airport after a long day at work when half of me just wanted to go home and watch Netflix on my couch. ‘What’s the point of flying across the ocean for two and a half days of vacation?’, I would ask myself. After having done it, I can confidently say that I don’t regret the trip at all. Was it enough time to properly see Portugal or even just Lisbon? Certainly not. You could easily spend a lifetime in Portugal and still not see everything worth seeing. But the experiences that I did have there were unique, amazing, fun, and will stay with me for the rest of my life.

To be honest, if my trip was even one day shorter, it probably wouldn’t have been worth it. That’s why I chose to go to Lisbon and not Barcelona, which also had a great plane fare for the same weekend but which would have added a layover to both ends of the trip and would essentially have only left me with a single day to see anything. Instead, I got two and a half days and I maximized every moment of them while still managing to not feel rushed most of the time.

The only real drawback to this whirlwind trip–and to all my international trips this year–is the carbon impact. Although personal travel only accounts for a fraction of greenhouse gas emissions and nothing will fundamentally change until we force multinational corporations, governments, and other large institutions to take action (or be abolished), climate change is an existential threat to humanity and I do want to start spacing out my international trips to reduce my carbon footprint. So next year, I am planning to most likely only travel within North America and to limit the number of flights I take. I will still do some traveling though, and I still plan to blog about my adventures. And within the next several years, I still hope to visit other places on my bucket list like India/Nepal and the “Stans”. Just not right away.

That being said, I do still have one more big international adventure this year that I booked a while back. As I’ve said before on this blog (and readers who remember me mentioning this are clearly more attentive than my own family members who claimed to have no prior knowledge of this before Thanksgiving), I will be spending my Winter Break in Morocco.

Morocco suffered a devastating earthquake in September, and for a while I thought I might need to cancel my trip, but I’ve spoken to people who live in Morocco or are currently visiting there as well as reading and listening to other reputable sources, and everyone agrees that there is no reason to postpone or cancel my trip. The earthquake killed thousands of people and destroyed entire communities, but the primary impact has been in mountain villages in an area that is typically not visited by tourists and which I have no plans to go to. It is true that significant damage was done to historical structures in Marrakech, including the Bahia Palace, the Medina, and the old Jewish Quarter, but almost everything is apparently open and back to normal in Marrakech now. The other areas I plan to visit were not really impacted at all, and everyone I have talked to says that Morocco-which relies on tourism as one of its primary sources of income–needs visitors now more than ever. So my trip is still on and I’m very excited for it.

I will fly into Marrakech after changing planes in Casablanca. After staying in Marrakech in a traditional riad (guesthouse) for a few days, I will take a 4-day/3-night desert tour that takes me through the Atlas Mountains to Merzouga in the Sahara desert. This is a group tour booked through a third party and I’m not thrilled about that aspect, but one of the drawbacks of traveling solo is that private tours can sometimes be prohibitively expensive, as can multi-day car rentals. I’ll still be staying in the desert for two nights instead of the typical one night whirlwind visit that most of these group tours offer. At the end of the desert tour, I will be dropped of in Fes, where I will stay for a few days and ring in the New Year before flying home from Casablanca. If I’m lucky, there’s even a chance that I might get to meet up with a friend and coworker towards the end of my trip.

I probably won’t post anything more to the blog until after that Morocco trip. So check back some time in January, or better yet, scroll down to the bottom of this page and take 5 seconds to sign up for my email list. I know we all get too much email, but this is going to be less than once a month and then you’ll know immediately when new content is available. Until then, check out the photo collection, catch up on any previous posts you might have missed, and if you liked this post or my blog in general, please share it with others who might also enjoy it. As always, thanks for your support, and have a wonderful holiday season!

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