Dark sights in Évora
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Capela dos Ossos
What draws the crowds, though, is the mesmerising Capela dos Ossos. A small room behind the altar has walls and columns lined with carefully arranged bones and skulls of some 5000 people. Visitors here describe the sight as macabre, artistic, ghoulish or beautiful (and, tasteful or not, we even heard several people humming ‘Dem bones, dem bones, dem dry bones’). According to records, 17th-century Franciscan monks constructed this as a memento mori (reminder of death) to meditate on the human condition. An inscription over the entrance translates as: ‘We bones await yours’.
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