Lisbon Letter (2)

As well as having fun in Alfama, choosing badly in restaurants and eating too many custard tarts, we made a couple of day trips.

Firstly, Evora, a couple of hours away by train, and probably most famous for the Capela dos Ossos, part of the Church of St Francis. Faced with a dearth of interior design ideas, and having 5,000 exhumed bodies on hand, the entrepreneurial Franciscan monks thought that lining the walls of the chapel would be a good use for all those hard-to-store bones.

It was strangely aesthetic rather than gruesome, although the building trade are unlikely to offer it to would-be buyers anytime soon. Still, for DIY…

There was also a museum displaying, among other things, a part of the monastery’s collection of over 2,000 nativity scenes, some of which were magnificent pieces of craftsmanship and others just plain weird.

Evora also has a Roman connection, and we took a walk past the ruins of the Temple of Evora, another part of the town’s UNESCO heritage.

We also visited Sintra, set in a lush, beautiful bunch of hills just northeast of the city.

Joining a surging mass of tourists, we queued up for our turn in the Pena Palace, a fantastical faux fortress built in 1838, by then King Consort Ferdinand II (although it was on the site of a ruined fortress that had existed since the Middle Ages). It had spectacular views of the surrounding countryside (at least, after the fog lifted) and the clambering around the ramparts was fun, but we had to sort of flow through the interiors along with the rest of the sea of visitors and didn’t really get a chance to savour the experience.

More interesting in some ways was the National Palace, in Sintra township itself. With heritage dating back to the Moors and additions made, mainly in the 15th and 16th centuries, by a succession of kings and queens, it was a quite fascinating look at the way the royal court lived and interacted with the rest of us.

The National Palace also has a pair of very distinctive tall, white towers and we pondered over their use until, at the end of the tour, in the kitchen, we found out that they were the chimneys!

Our time in Lisbon has now come to an end, almost as soon as we had mastered the metro, taken the tram and learnt the labyrinth of the local area. We are off to the Algarve tomorrow for - hopefully - some time in the sun.Read more