Day trip to Alentejo - Évora and Evoramonte

The 1st of December is a bank holiday in Portugal and so, we didn’t have classes. Apparently, the celebrate the independence of Spain. And what does it mean, if we don’t have classes? We go sightseeing!

Together with a friend, I drove to the region of Alentejo to see the cities of Évora and Evoramonte. It took us about two hours with the car to get there and luckily this distance was enough for a weather change. In Lisbon, it was raining cats and dogs all day long and we had sunshine at its best! Already driving through the hilly region with its olive groves and impressive cork trees made it worth the drive. We even stopped at an orange tree to get some and take them home. And they were delicious! For me, it is still strange to live in a country, where oranges just grow everywhere. And people here, just want to get rid of them, because they get more and more.

We visited an old castle in Evoramonte, where we had a great view over the surrounding hills. The castle itself was not interesting.

Évora is a very cute and picturesque city. You can reach everything on foot and it is very small, so you also find everything very fast. We visited the big church and the Capela dos ossos, so the chapel of the bones. This chapel reminded me a lot of the catacombs in Paris (read more about that in my Blog about Paris). Yes, it was clearly less bones, only about 5000 skeletons, but it did have the same structure, meaning that all the walls were decorated with the bones in different patterns and some whole skeletons were shown in vitrines. Over the door it is written: "Nossos ossos que aqui estamos, pelos vossos esperamos", which means: "our bones wait here for yours". A little macabre, but very impressive. Apart from that, we saw a beautiful cathedral, the nice place Praça do Giraldo and the ruins of the Greek temple of Diana. It is a very nice place to stroll through the city centre and go shopping, try the local specialities or drinking coffee. We only came in the evening, so everything was already closing and we only had dinner, before returning to Lisbon.

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