Evora

After another breakfast around the circa 1700 dining table we headed off to our next destination. We decided to have a look at a town called Peniche on the coast around 30 minutes away for no known reason. When we got there it looked a bit grungy so we did a walk around the lighthouse and a bit of rock hopping over a really odd terrain, where it looked like the boulders had been drilled out with big hole saws. We hadn’t seen anything like it. We also watched a couple of guys fishing from a cliff, standing on the edge and casting out to a drop of what must have been 50 metres. On the way out of Peniche a couple of kilometres south is a surf spot called Supertubos where the WSL holds a round. It’s a very sleepy surf town, out of season, and there was no surf so we grabbed a coffee and hit the toll roads to Evora, the capital of the Alentejo region and around 150km east of Lisbon. Before getting to Evora we were hoping to look at a site like Stonehenge but 2000 years older however it was like the road was the original from when the stones were laid so we turned around with the car still in one piece. We arrived in Evora and again it was a challenge of negotiating very narrow lanes in the correct direction and not taking out someone’s front door but we got here, We unloaded the luggage and I drove the car to a free car park around 400 metres away. We threw a load of washing on which we have been looking forward to and had a look around the town and ticked off a couple of sites including The Chapel of Bones, where the walls and pillars are covered with thousands of bones and skulls. In the church next door there was a permanent exhibition of a private collection of nativity scenes, so if that is the thing that rocks your boat Evora is the place for you. After the excitement of the nativity scenes I had to have a drink which stretched into dinner and thoughts for tomorrow.Read more