Ah, Évora. It is a city that wears its centuries like a well-worn, slightly dusty academic robe — dignified, a bit eccentric, and perpetually smelling of old stone and sun-baked cork. While most visitors treat it as a mere pit-stop between Lisbon and the Spanish border, the true joy of Évora is found in its delightful refusal to be rushed. Old is constantly bumping into New on the street, and they never get in each other’s way.
We spent three days there, and that seemed just about right. There’s a lot to see and do. The Vila Galé Évora Hotel was awesome! And an easy walk into the city center.
The city is encircled by formidable stone walls. So, access points into town are rather limited. There is absolutely no reason to drive into the city center. The streets are crazy narrow, and there’s no place to park.
The original Roman wall dates back to the 3rd century AD, surrounds approximately 25 acres, and stretches nearly 1.24 miles. It’s quite impressive.
The Romans conquered the town in 80 BC and eventually expanded it into a walled town, so the first defensive structures go back over 2,000 years. It’s definitely a blast from the past.
After the Romans, the Moors of North Africa cleaned house between the 8th and the 12th centuries. The lightning-fast Umayyad invasion expelled the Visigoths from the Roman city of Ebora, and it was renamed Yabura. All of Portugal soon fell under the control of the Moors, who organized their new territory into military marches subdivided into districts called kuwar.
Outside the city walls, each community had its own quarter — a Mozarabic (Christian-under-Muslim-rule) suburb to the north called São Mamede, a Jewish suburb to the west, and a Muslim suburb to the south. Over time, these quarters shaped the city’s growth and overlapped with the older Roman street grid.
The city didn’t remain Moorish the whole time. It changed hands more than once.
In 913, King Ordonho II of Galicia and León besieged and captured the town, killing the governor inside a mosque and taking over 4,000 captives; the following year, the Moors retook and repopulated the city, rebuilding the old Roman walls. Évora then flourished again under Muslim rule for centuries afterward until 1165, when Gerald the Fearless captured the city once and for all for the Kingdom of Portugal.
What we found most interesting was that Évora’s Cathedral stands on the site of the city’s principal mosque, following the widespread Christian practice of building churches directly atop former Islamic religious sites as a symbolic marker of reconquest, like dogs pissing on a tree. Construction of the current cathedral began in 1186, immediately after the Moors were expelled.
Beyond the cathedral site itself, the clearest Moorish legacy is the irregular medieval street pattern radiating out from Praça do Giraldo — originally the Moorish market square — along with sections of the defensive walls that the Moors rebuilt and expanded from the original Roman fortifications. Essentially, the Portuguese despised the Muslims intensely and made sure that nothing related to their conquest survived.
The walls we saw surrounding the historic center today are primarily the Vauban-style walls built in the 17th century, according to plans by French engineer Nicolas de Langres. It’s essentially a 2,000-year-old wall that kept getting upgraded by whoever took the city by force. It reflects Portugal’s relationship with time in one structure, like a conqueror’s layer cake built in stone.
The theme of our first full day was death, oh glorious death. And the Portuguese serve up death À la carte. You get to pick and choose depending on your lot in life. It’s really big business and incredibly convoluted.
Directly across the street from our hotel was the heavenly Cemitario de Évora, where there were countless family mausoleums, some as big as garages, many with fancy lace curtains and heart-rending memorabilia, including photos and treasured jewelry. Virtually every tombstone was adorned with a bouquet of artificial flowers, usually in a sturdy vase — some even made of marble or bronze.
Évora’s main cemetery has an interesting backstory: it was originally a monastery. But then came the Liberal Wars (1828–1834), also called the War of the Two Brothers, a civil war between the liberal constitutionalists, led by former King Pedro IV, and the conservative absolutists, led by King Miguel I. They fought over Portugal’s system of government and royal succession. Pedro ultimately prevailed, and one of his first acts as regent was to confiscate the property of everyone who had served Miguel. And then he suppressed all religious houses and confiscated their property too, an act that froze relations with Rome for nearly eight years.
The dissolution was enacted by decree on 28 May 1834 by Joaquim António de Aguiar, at the war’s conclusion, nationalizing the property of male monastic orders and terminating state recognition of religious orders — more than 500 monasteries had their lands and possessions seized. The law earned him the lasting nickname “Friar-Killer.”
The new government hoped to redistribute the confiscated land to poorer landowners, but few could actually afford to buy it, so much of it ended up concentrated in the hands of wealthier buyers, rather than achieving the intended land reform.
After the Liberal victory, the state handed the Évora Monastery to the Municipal Council in 1840, which converted the convent grounds into the city’s public cemetery. That’s likely why there was such an odd mix of a formal, almost architectural burial-ground layout, with tombs arranged along what were probably cloister walls or garden paths.
In this vast cemetery, stretching a football field long in every direction, there was one black granite crypt that stood out like a black swan. The story behind the color was a lesson not in past transgressions but in changing trends. Black granite has become a popular alternative for newer tombs across Portugal in the last few decades — not specific to Évora. Black granite in Portugal is frequently sourced from Spain, Brazil, India, or Zimbabwe, since black granite deposits aren’t as common in Portugal as white marble is, so it’s also a bit of a status symbol for the family. It also requires less maintenance because it doesn’t stain, weather, or grow moss/lichen the way porous marble does, which matters in a climate with hot dry summers and wet winters. It’s easier to read because the engraved gold or white lettering shows up crisply on black granite for generations, whereas carved marble lettering can erode and become hard to read. Basically, it’s hip and modern, and a way for a family plot to stand out against the older white marble monuments around it.
The cemetery’s entrance features a spectacular Renaissance marble portal salvaged from the demolished Convento de São Domingos, attributed to the French-born sculptor Nicolau de Chanterene. So visitors walk into a graveyard through a 1537 doorway that once belonged to an entirely different, now-vanished monastery.
Just inside the towering front gate, the flower-covered columbarium occupied the entire front wall of the property, housing the remains of hundreds of Évorans. As burial space has gotten more and more limited in Portugal, cremation has become a very popular alternative.
While modern city-dwellers might opt for Cremation (which only became popular after the Church allowed it in 1963), rural traditions persist. You may still see widows in small villages who wear black for the remainder of their lives as a permanent sign of mourning. We saw several old, hunched-over widows in black, obediently roaming the cemetery.
In Portugal, death is handled with an efficiency that might startle most folks — or anyone accustomed to a two-week viewing period. Traditionally, funerals in Portugal are brisk affairs, often held within 24 to 48 hours. This speed is a practical nod to the warm climate and a lack of historical embalming.
The Portuguese have long grappled with the fact that land is finite, but the dead are, well, cumulative. They never stop coming.
In many public cemeteries, a grave isn’t forever; it’s more like a negotiated lease. If the family doesn’t renew the rent or buy the plot outright, the body is exhumed, and the bones are moved to a much smaller, permanent residence: an ossuary box (a small chest or container used to store human skeletal remains after a body has decomposed in a temporary grave).
In any Portuguese cemetery, you will often see jazigos — mausoleums that look like miniature Portuguese houses, complete with windows, doors, and decorative tiles. They are essentially bunk beds for caskets, stacked atop one another to save space.
Some are Perpétuo (Perpetual) and are purchased permanently, with the option to be passed down through generations. They act like a piece of post-death real estate for the family.
Others are Temporário (Temporary) and function like a lease, typically for 3 to 5 years. After this period, the remains are usually exhumed and moved to an ossuary, so the space can be reused.
And then there are the family versions, which are private to a specific lineage, while municipal or community versions (sometimes called gavetões) group multiple unrelated burials in a single public structure, like death hostels.
In 1846, the Portuguese government tried to ban burying people inside churches for “sanitary reasons” — a move that backfired spectacularly. A woman known as Maria da Fonte led a violent peasant revolt in the Minho region, essentially telling the government they could have their hygiene, but the locals would keep their sacred floorboards. The rebellion grew so large that it actually toppled the government.
Which brings us full circle to the Capela dos Ossos (Chapel of Bones), Evora’s most famous house of horrors. Built in the 16th century by Franciscan monks who apparently found wallpaper too pedestrian, the walls and pillars are meticulously decorated with the remains of roughly 5,000 former residents of the town.
It’s essentially a 17th-century memento mori designed to remind the local nobility that their fancy silks won’t save them from the eventual skeletal uniformity of the grave. Bones all look the same.
The famous greeting above the door of the Chapel of Bones — “We bones that are here, for yours we wait” — is perhaps the most honest welcome mat in Europe.
And it gets weirder. There are two desiccated corpses in glass cases. For years, legend claimed they were a father and son cursed by a mistreated mother; modern science suggests they are a very well-preserved adult male and a small child with no relation at all.
Believe it or not, the Italians also went in for the same twisted, human-bones-in-the-wall interior design style.
Amazingly, Inna and I have seen the three most famous ones.
There’s the San Bernardino alle Ossa in Milan: A small ossuary built in 1210 and decorated with skulls and bones. It is located near the Milan Duomo, in Piazza Santo Stefano.
And then there’s the super creepy Capuchin Crypt in Rome, containing the remains of over 4,000 friars, with bones intricately arranged on the ceilings and walls of several small chapels.
And last but not least, there’s the Santa Maria dell’Orazione e Morte Church, also in Rome near the Tiber River, which once held thousands of bodies in its catacombs and features a macabre, skull-adorned exterior.
It’s amazing the creepy crap the Christians get away with. Can you imagine what would happen if the Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks dug up a few thousand graves from the Elks National Cemetery in Chicago and decorated their national headquarters with the bones?
I’m guessing it wouldn’t end well.
But in Europe, they charge admission.
Go figure.
