Évora
A walled town you do not drive in, in the middle of a plain without a single hill
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- September 21° · 7 rainy days
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- 2days
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Évora is the capital of the Alentejo, a province that takes up a third of Portugal and has the lowest population density in the country — a plain of cork oaks, summer daytime highs over forty degrees and empty roads. The town sits inside its walls and you do not drive in it.
The reason for the UNESCO listing is not one building but that the town kept the shape it had in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, when the royal court sat here. The streets are narrow, the houses white with yellow trim, and all of it fits into a twenty-minute circle.
The first-century Roman temple stands on the highest point and survived because for centuries it was walled into a butcher's shop — it was only uncovered in the nineteenth century, when the walls around it came down. That story explains why it has columns but no roof, and why it is in better condition than most Roman temples in Iberia.
The Alentejo is also a wine region that has come to rival the Douro by volume over the past twenty years, and tastings happen in the town itself or at estates half an hour away.
What to see in Évora
The Roman temple
First century, preserved because it spent centuries walled into a butcher's shop. Best in the evening, when it is lit.
The Chapel of Bones
Walls lined with bones from the town cemeteries, inside the Church of St Francis. The inscription over the door reads: 'We bones that are here, for yours we wait.'
The cathedral roof
A thirteenth-century Gothic cathedral whose roof you can walk out onto — the whole Alentejo plain from up there.
The walls and the aqueduct
A sixteenth-century aqueduct runs into the town and houses have grown into its arches. You walk alongside it.
Alentejo wine
The region that now rivals the Douro by volume. Tastings in town or at estates half an hour out.
Almendres
A stone circle of almost a hundred menhirs, older than Stonehenge, fifteen kilometres west. No fence and no ticket.
Two things you probably did not know
The Chapel of Bones in Evora is lined with the bones of around five thousand people, dug up from the city's cemeteries in the sixteenth century. The inscription at the door says the bones inside are waiting for yours.
Around Evora is the largest concentration of megaliths on the Iberian peninsula. The Almendres Cromlech has almost a hundred standing stones and is older than Stonehenge and the Egyptian pyramids.
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