A Roman temple stands above the Alentejo plain — and 5,000 skulls wait below
Évora is a UNESCO World Heritage walled city rising from the flat wheat plains of the Alentejo, and arguably Portugal's most complete historic city outside Lisbon. At its center stands the Temple of Diana — one of the best-preserved Roman temples on the Iberian Peninsula, its 14 Corinthian columns rising above the city on a 1st-century platform. Below street level is the Roman baths complex; across the square is the cathedral, begun in 1186. The most unsettling site is the Capela dos Ossos (Chapel of Bones) inside the Church of St Francis — a 17th-century Franciscan chapel whose walls and col…
The Romans established Liberalitas Iulia here in the 1st century BC as an administrative centre for the province of Lusitania, leaving behind the remarkably intact Corinthian-column temple now miscalled 'Temple of Diana' — a Renaissance-era misattribution, as it was likely dedicated to the Imperial Cult. Évora passed through Visigoth and eight centuries of Moorish rule before the Christian Reconquista of 1165. The city reached its peak under the Aviz dynasty in the 15th-16th centuries, when it briefly rivalled Lisbon as a cultural center; Portugal's first university was founded here in 1559.