My wife and I were here on a Gate1 tour, we went on a morning Evora city tour, and the first stop was the Sao Francisco Church (Igreja de São Francisco), which is famous for its Ossuary chapel (Capela dos Ossos- Chapel of Bones, whose walls are decorated with thousands of human bones and skulls. One of the s girls was really scared with the bones and I comforted her (11 years old) and she calmed down thereafter. An estimated 5,000 corpses were exhumed to decorate the walls of the chapel. The bones, which came from ordinary people who were buried in Évora's medieval cemeteries, were arranged by the Franciscans in a variety of patterns.
The church itself is huge, beautiful, Gothic style, with 12 open chapels. read more