Bones, Bones and More Bones in Evora, Portugal

Ossuary in Evora

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Time to head out for a couple of days, and get away from our home base in Cascais. We took a bus up to Evora, and old walled city about 150km East of Lisbon. The historic centre is also a Unesco World Heritage site, and we tend to like to see as many of these as possible. Evora was a quaint little town, with little old streets and plenty of interesting old buildings.


First thing we had to do was find a place to stay. This feels more like traveling now, and a part that we sometimes enjoy, but also gets a little tiring. In Evora though, we found a little gem. After checking out a couple of dated rooms in some characterless hotels, we stumbled across a little hostel that we didn't have in our Lonely Planet guide book. The place called Evora Old Hostel, has only been open for about a year, and the owner Pedro was a great guy. He spoke excellent English and really made us welcome in his 4 room, very clean hostel. He had plenty of info and stories too, and we enjoyed speaking with him. A great start.

Termas Romana - Evora

He sent us out looking at some of the main sights in town, at we enjoyed just sitting around in the old square, watching life pass us by. Tons of old men in the square doing the same thing as us. Walking around, we passed the Termas Romano (Roman ruins), dating back to the 2nd century. Basically looked like a small version of the Acropolis, with 14 columns still remaining. Another ancient Roman addition to the town was a the aqueduct. This aqueduct was about 20km long or so, with big arches all the way into town. Some of the old townspeople took advantage of the pre-built walls and built houses in the archways of the aqueduct. Don't think they would be allowed to do that nowadays!!

The highlight for me, and the reason I heard about Evora 10 years ago, was the Ossuary. Basically, there were 42 cemeteries, full of monk bones. Since there was little space remaining in the city walls to build, they decided to consolidate all the bones into one sacred place. They dug up the bones, and built the interior walls and pillars of a church with them. It was a bit eerie, but we've also seen something similar to this in Kutna Hora, Czech Republic. The walls were as thick as femurs are long; as the femurs were stacked up on top of each other with mortar in between. Some rows of skulls thrown in for good measure! Lining the ceiling were archways of skulls, following the lines of the structure. Add to all this, some dim lighting and it made for a very interesting, but gruesome place to visit.

A great little side trip, but we were headed back to Cascais to our home base. *Stub