Our last stop in Portugal was Lisbon but the AirBnb we booked was a small house in a town called Sesimbra about 40min drive south of the capital city - ironically about the same distance that we lived from Boston.
The drive up from Carrapateira allowed us to see a few small towns along the West coast. Some of these towns are a little more isolated from the point of view of road travel - being midpoint between Lisbon and the south coast, but a couple of them are large enough to be full blown cities in their own right.
Our first stop was near Odemira which looks like a small, peaceful town, if a little too remote from any major centers. The view of the beach close to the town was spectacular as usual.
An interesting statue stands at the top of the town's main beaches.
The small development in Sesimbra is characteristically populated with a mix of finished new houses - the architecture, a simple block-on-block design which I guess has to grow on you and some older houses and plenty of open lots and unfinished buildings bearing witness to the fallout of the economic woes of the early 2000's.
The walk to the beach here was around 30min and the most popular area is a large lagoon, at the moment closed off from the ocean by soft sand that has built up in the absence of storms that would ordinarily keep the mouth open.
The area is very popular for kite surfing and we saw plenty of it. The beach itself has wild waves and a strong backwash and the sea water is Atlantic cold so not terribly appealing - even though the water is a touch warmer than Boston (similar to Camp's Bay water temperatures in Cape Town).
Emma and Jess visited us for a 4 day weekend at the end of our stay in Sesimbra.
We had discovered some dirt paths on the ocean side of our settlement that led to more isolated beaches and realized after two encounters with naked people walking along the beach that we really should have done more research before venturing out in that direction.
In our defense when we visited the beaches around here we were surprised to see that there were fewer women sunbathing topless and I assumed up here near Lisbon is was less common - so too was a second more isolated beach which had an area close to a parking lot
Where we miscalculated was that stretches of this beaches are a world famous naturist area called Praia do Meco - infamous back in the day because it was the first naturalist beach in Portugal. The nudist beach is to the left of the public and family friendly area below the stairs and near the two restaurants (which were still closed for the season).
So it was that we were surprised on two occasions to see someone walking towards us who turned out to be naked. They had obviously not read the description of where the nude beach was either.
Before Emma and Jess arrived, Anne and I made an attempt to go to Lisbon for a morning in the car to see Sintra which is a beautiful area that attracted the rich residents to build homes in the hills to escape the heat in summer.
There is a palace up there that we thought would be good to see - but the morning traffic and the crowds visiting the palace made it impossible to do more than drive past it and then turn around to come back for the start of my work day. We'll have to make that trip again when we have more time and we've figured out public transport a little better.
We took a trip to Lisbon on the Saturday, this time parking at the ferry on the South Bank of the river Tagus - the great river that we had seen in Santerém that starts somewhere in Spain. We walked around a bit before deciding to just give in to the hop-on-hop off bus tour which took us past some of the sights in the city including Jeronimo's Monastery,
the 25th April Bridge (named after the 1974 Carnation revolution)
and the monument to the ocean explorers (we learned about two of them in history over and over each year at school: Vasco Da Gama and Bartholomew Diaz - although our school-learned pronunciation of their names would make them unrecognizable in Portugal).
It was lovely to have Emma and Jess visit us for these four days despite the exposure to over-exposed individuals which gave us a few laughs in the days after.
On Sunday we took a trip to the city of Evora, which has the oldest university in Portugal. It was an hour-long trip and a much larger city than I expected. We drove up some really narrow streets and parked near a beautiful cathedral which is close to the ruins of a Roman temple to Diana.
The cathedral offers views of the city and is magnificently decorated. It was built between 1186 and 1204 but went through series of additions and enlargements over about an 80 year period when gothic-style additions were made.
The cardinal of this cathedral was the brother of King John III (The Pious) from 1512-1580 who ended up being the king of Portugal for two years after the ruling king was killed in a battle in Morocco.
At lunch we had a very entertaining waiter who was playing games with French, English and Portuguese while he was taking our order. We were trying to order in Portuguese but our rate of success hasn't been great.
We then went to a Franciscan cathedral - also very lavishly decorated and then on to the Chapel of the Bones which is just what you'd imagine from the name.
We read a few articles about this chapel. Some articles gloss over the origin of the bones to emphasize the message in the building, while others describe them as the bones of 5000 Muslims who had been murdered.
An article explains that the origin of this chapel in the 16th Century: the cemeteries around the city were overcrowded and as the city was expanding so it was decided to relocate the corpses to another location. The Franciscan monks of Évora decided to give the corpses a more honorable final resting place that would serve a more noble purpose - to educate and warn the local citizens that they too were mortal and should pause in their increasingly wayward journey to think about their mortality.
Since the 18th century until fairly recently two full skeletons were hung from the ceiling. I read in one of the descriptions of the chapel that this was reminiscent of a legend about a woman cursing her husband and child on her deathbed that their bones would never decay for having treated her badly.
These two skeletons are now displayed in glass cases.
Which brings us back to whether these were all murdered Muslim corpses. The claim makes it seem like the monks deliberately desecrated the corpses of Muslims but it seems they desecrated the corpses of cemeteries without regard for the religion. The practice of moving bones from cemeteries into ossuaries was common throughout Catholic Europe until recently.
However, multiple articles confirm that 5000 corpses were used in this building and it is true that the Moors occupied Portugal between the 8th and 12th Century. When the Moors invaded, they gave the cities a choice: surrender, keep your property, faith and autonomy and pay a tax for their unbelief to the Muslim faith, or risk the lives of all the males and risk slavery for the women.
The result was that most of rural Portugal converted to Islam, and the Moors and local people in the cities learned to prosper and live together, Arabic became the main language resulting in over 1000 Arabic words being introduced into Portuguese. The art, culture and technology that was introduced by the Moors in Spain and Portugal propelled Europe into the Renaissance.
In 1139 the new King of Portugal began to expel the Moors from Portugal, with the help of Christian Crusaders who completed the expulsion. The Christians didn't show the same tolerance and the once vibrant Muslim communities in Portugal were murdered, expelled or forced to convert to Christianity. The famous explorer, Vasco da Gama has been accused of waging a war on Muslims in reprisal for attacks on the Portuguese which culminated in his burning a ship full of Muslim pilgrims - a historical fact that isn't often mentioned.
In 2019 a newly found far-right party claimed a seat in the Portuguese government. They espouse the Christian Nationalist views once held by the autocratic ruler who was overthrown in the Carnation Revolution. For example they oppose teaching about Islam in public schools and gloss over the conquests and rule of Portugal by the Moors and the Visigoths while focusing on the Christian conquest of the Moors.
This is eerily similar to what we experienced in South Africa growing up, where the ideas of apartheid were espoused as "noble" and "generous". And also more recently to the USA Christian conservative movement's desires to downplay or ban the teaching of historical events that undermine their nationalist views (like slavery and voter suppression and to rewrite some of the significant events in the civil right's movement).
Despite this somber recounting of history we have been amazed at how welcoming the Portuguese people are of visitors and immigrants. It is quite amazing to hear open encouragement - like old friends telling you to come over any time.
And really mean it.
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