Road to Portugal, 1982
“The Palacio Nacional da Pena is one of the finest tourist attractions in Portugal and exemplifies the 19th century Romanticism style of architecture. The palace is a hedonistic mix of vividly painted terraces, decorative battlements and mythological statues, all of which stand at stark contrast to the lush greens of the Parque de Pena forest.”
“The day that I die is better than the day that I was born.” At least that’s what the phrase in Latin says at this Capela dos Ossos or chapel of bones. we were in Lisbon watching the television and saw an ad for some kind of festival in the town of Evora, Portugal. We had time before we headed south to the Costa do Sol and we had this little car, a Mini Morris, I think it was called. It was an hour and a half drive through the countryside to Evora, so we figured we could do it in a day and still have time to get down to our hotel at the ‘Sol.
It’s the Church of St. Francis in Evora. We didn’t know it was there until we got there and some locals asked us if were were there to see the bones. The church was built with human bones (somewhere in the area of 5000 skeletons) by a Franciscan monk and they say after he died, his body was hung on the wall. See it there on the right in the above picture?