We were somewhat disappointed by our supposedly fancy hotel last night. For the price of 75€ per night (after my “genius” discount) and the four-star quality rating from Booking, we would at least expect things to work. Things like the toilet (refused to flush), the wifi (nonexistent in our room) and the AC/heating system. Solutions were, respectively, bang tank against back wall (which we didn’t want to do at night since there was another guest room on the other side), go down to the common area, wear a sweater or open the door to the terrace. Breakfast was very good, so I guess that brings up the overall score.
After breakfast, we decided to follow the walking tour described in Rick Steves’ guidebook, which we both have on our phones. It seems Évora is more about the city and its history than individual sights. The tour was definitely worth the hour we spent because there were several things we would never have noticed on our own.
Church and convent that are now a cultural centre and post office. Part of the current structure was a Roman tower, once part of the city wall.
I zoomed in on this interesting relief set into the wall above the cloister. Apparently it depicts local Christian hero Geraldo the fearless with two severed Muslim heads.
After looking through the treasury/museum (no photography allowed), we headed off to find the famous chapel of bones. First, though, we stepped into the Church of St Francis.
Church of St Francis. It’s original style was simple, even austere, before wealthy families started tarting it up.
“Dispatch House of the Third Order of Penitence of St Francis”. In other words, a meeting room built ~1700. The “table of brotherhood” was installed in 1725.
We went outside and looked into the chapel of bones but decided we didn’t really want to pay to go in today. Instead, we walked down to the train station to check our options for leaving by train tomorrow. On our way w3 passed through the public market building but it didn’t seem to have a proper marker anymore.
Back up to just past the market to have lunch and work out our preferred plan for our last week in Portugal.
We had considered several options. I had planned a series of routes from Évora heading north as far as Vila Velna de Ródão, from whence we’d take a train along the Tagus (no roads there) and work our way back to Lisbon via Tomas, Batalha, and Nazaré, but I didn’t think we had enough time. We also considered just riding back to Lisbon but it would be 2 or 3 days of riding through likely mediocre scenery with at least one of those days into a strong (~30 km/h) forecasted headwind and potentially rain. We then thought we’d take the train back to Lisbon for one night, pack our bikes, and then go up to Porto for a night or two. However, no rooms were available at the hotel storing our bike cases tomorrow night, so that wasn’t going to work. Could we not stop in Lisbon and just take our bikes with us to Porto? We returned to the station and asked. Yes, we could. Not as easy as train travel without bikes, but doable. We bought our tickets. Évora to Porto and then Porto to Lisbon. We returned to our hotel where Al did the bike chains out on the terrace and I used the wifi in the common area to book accommodation in Porto and create cycling routes from our hotel to the station and from Porto Campagnha to the apartment I’d booked.
The entrance to our hotel in Évora. We opted not to store our bikes just locked to each other through that gateway.
