Category Archives: Photography

Day 9 – Tomar

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Saturday 5 September – It was rather nice not having to leap out of bed at 7am in order to pack our bags ready for them to be transferred to the next accommodation, because today was a rest day – we can not-hike without feeling a scrap of guilt. That said, the alarm still went off at 7am because we wanted to get out and about in Tomar before the (forecast 38°C) heat of the day became too oppressive for walking around in.

Tomar is, as I’ve said, Knights Templar GHQ, and the centre of the GHQ is the castle at the top of the hill, which we could see from our hotel room.

Firstly, then, a little more historical background to explain why what we saw during the day is a matter of such pith and moment.

The castle, built (you remember, of course) from 1160 by Gualdim Pais, was built primarily as part of the country’s defence against the band of marauding riffs Moorish empire (it withstood a Moorish siege in 1190, for example). It’s one of Portugal’s most significant historical and architectural sites. Inside the castle walls, over the centuries, a huge convent was developed, based around an original construction known as the “Charola”.

The Charola is a round Templar church at the heart of the complex, built by Gualdim Pais in the years following the foundation of the fortress. It took the form of a two-tier Romanesque rotunda modelled on Jerusalem’s Church of the Holy Sepulchre: an inner octagonal drum resting on eight pillars, wrapped in a sixteen-sided ambulatory. Tradition holds that Templar knights could hear Mass from horseback within it.

After the Templars were suppressed in 1312 and the Order of Christ was founded in 1319 as their successor, the Charola remained the spiritual centre of the complex, but it began to grow. Prince Henry the Navigator, serving as Grand Master in the fifteenth century, added a nave onto the round church, considerably extending its size and setting the stage for a fuller conventual church.

The major rebuilding and decoration came under King Manuel I in the early sixteenth century. He had Henry’s nave reconstructed in, unsurprisingly, the elaborate Manueline style named after him. João de Castilho contributed the ornate portal linking the old Charola to the new Manueline church, while the famous Chapter House Window (of which more later) dates from the same period. The Charola’s own remarkable interior decoration — murals, polychrome wood statues, and gilding — was largely executed across the sixteenth century as well. Hugely extending the scope of the edifice, the convent’s eight cloisters were added in further stages after this, starting in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.

So: this was to be the main object of our peregrinations today. As you can see from the photo, it’s another thing that is (sigh) at the top of a hill. We passed the city’s Pillory

and walked up

and up

until we saw the line of coaches that told us we must be at the entrance. Three more flights of stairs took us into the Convent of Christ’s innards, past a moquette of the edifice

in which you can see the central nature of the “drum” surrounding the Charola, past a courtyard or two

in which we could see some Manueline window elaboration and some beautiful tiling.

Then we rounded a corner into the Charola itself and

Oh. My. God.

If you have six minutes or so to spare, I hope that this video gives some kind of impression of how gobsmackingly extraordinary the Charola is.

and here are some photos as well. It’s impossible to do justice to how impressive it is.

The ceiling

Artwork on the walls

Figures inside the Octagon

Figures inside the Octagon

It’s a work in progress; there is considerable restoration work going on, a project which (if the guide we earwigged is right) will take 50 years. This is partly through neglect and partly through idiocy; apparently one king had that fabulous ceiling painted over in white and they’re only slowly and carefully restoring it. There are frescoes

whose surrounds need significant restoration work. Some of the artworks on the walls have been lost; the remaning ones have been concentrated in one area to give an impression of what the whole thing must once have been like. One can only walk around it and gawp at the opulence of what has survived and been restored.

We were glad that we’d got there reasonably early, as it meant there were very few people there. As we left, a tour group arrived,

which would have put the kybosh on any chance of decent photography had we had to follw them. Instead we fled before them, trying to keep ahead as we looked into the nave and the inside of the famous Manueline Window

and carried on into the various cloisters.

These are photos from the Great Cloister, which has been beautifully cleaned up; others showed that there was a long way to go to knock the place into some kind of shape.

Then, of course, there was The Window – the Chapter House Window that is such a famous example of the over-the-top elaborate Manueline style. I had only heard vague references to it and seen representations in azulejos, so I wasn’t too surprised to see it like this.

I later learned that its pristine appearance is relatively recent. Courtesy of Travel in Portugal, I found out that until July 2022 it looked like this.

Image Countresy of Travel-in-Portugal.com

The entire façade that features the window has been cleaned up and looks wonderful.

(Sorry, this picture isn’t very good; in order to get the whole façade in, the perspective is rather distorted.)

The convent is a labyrinth and we blundered about a bit looking at various parts of it, eventually passing the very impressive refectory

with its pulpits on either side from which bible texts could be read whilst the monks ate,

the kitchens,

and the toilets.

We could have spent hours there, but after seeing the Charola, my brain was overwhelmed and not ready for delving into historical details about indiviual cloisters and other items. So we left by the entrance we’d arrived at, where there was a chap dressed up as a Knight Templar

who must have been boiling in his suit, and was rather disappointed that we didn’t want our photos taken with him, as that was how he got paid.

The convent is part of the castle complex, but one can’t get in to the castle at the moment as there is significant restoration work going on there as well. We took a look at what of the walls we could see

and peered at the view back over those bloody stairs of yesterday

(see the little pointy white thing top left? see the road down there bottom right?) before heading back into the city.

There were a couple of things that Jane wanted to make sure we took a look at. We started at the St. John the Baptist church so that we could grab a selo for our credenciales, and I took the opportunity for a shot of Gualdim Pais because the light was good.

Then we headed out to look at a couple of other churches. The first one was closed and the second one, the Igreja Santa Maria do Olival,

had a wedding about to start, so a grab shot of the interior was all that could be done today.

Its significance is that it is where the original Grand Master Knights are buried; maybe we’ll get a chance to explore before we leave Tomar. Getting to this church did afford us a splendid view of the castle walls

and we noted a few other things as we walked back to the hotel in heat that was beginning to be really very intense indeed – our early start had been a good idea.

There were a couple of attractive corners of the city worth photographing

but also we noticed that the pavements have been Templarised,

which must take a lot of work to create all those half tiles. We also saw this

a thing we’d first noted as we came into the city. Its significance only became clear when we took lunch at the hotel again. The restaurant has a mural around one wall

clearly summing up the city – and on it one can see the pre-restored Chapter House Window. In another corner of the mural, Jane spotted this

and the significance of the thing on that roundabout became clearer. The picture is of the Festa dos Tabuleiros (Trays), which originates from ancient pagan harvest rituals dedicated to the goddess Ceres, which later merged into the Cult of the Holy Spirit during the 14th century under Queen Saint Isabel and King Dinis. According to local legend, this is deeply tied to the “Miracle of the Roses,” where the charitable queen, confronted by her husband for sneaking bread to the poor, opened her cloak to reveal a shower of roses instead. The festival occurs every four years, and is next officially scheduled to take place from July 3 to July 12, 2027.
Everything culminates in the grand Sunday procession, where young women dressed in white symbolizing purity carry tall headdresses on their heads made of 30 stacked loaves of bread, decorated with colorful paper flowers, ears of corn, and topped with a crown and a white dove representing the Holy Spirit. They process through streets intricately decorated with hand-crafted paper flowers, assisted by their male partners walking alongside them to prevent any loss of balance along the crowded route. Apparently the 2023 event attracted 600,000 visitors.

The heat had once again become too punishing to make another sortie at all rewarding, so we relaxed for the rest of the day. The next Caminho section, to Cortiça, is 26km – seven or eight hours’ walking. With the combination of temperatures once again forecast to be high (34°C) and it being Sunday, meaning cafés en route will be largely closed, the discretion/valour A/B testing is coming down heavily in favour of A, so Uber may well get some more of our money. Stay tuned to find out, eh?

Day 8 Part 2 – Arriving in Tomar

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Friday 4 September 2026 – We arrived (exUberantly?) in Tomar shortly after midday at our very posh hotel.

It’s the Hotel dos Templarios. Yes, here we are in Tomar, Knights Templar GHQ. Just on entering the hotel, the Templar symbols abound.

So, before anything else, here’s a bit of background on the city of Tomar and the Knights Templar, a powerful medieval military religious order founded in 1118 to protect Christian pilgrims traveling to the Holy Land.

Tomar was founded in 1160 by Gualdim Pais, a crusader knight and Grand Master of the Knights Templar in Portugal, on land granted to the Order by King Afonso Henriques as a reward for their role in the Reconquista. Pais built the town’s castle and fortress on a hill above the Nabão river, designed to guard the frontier and the road to Lisbon against Moorish incursions.

After the Knights Templar were suppressed across Europe in the early 14th century (Pope Clement V dissolved the order in 1312, under pressure from Philip IV of France), Portugal’s King Dinis took a different path. Rather than persecute the Templars as other monarchs did, he negotiated with the papacy to have their assets and personnel transferred into a new Portuguese order, the Order of Christ, founded in 1319 with its headquarters at Tomar — effectively the Templars continuing under a new name and royal control.

The Order of Christ was extraordinarily wealthy, and in the 15th century that wealth (and the order’s crusading, seafaring ethos) fused directly with Portuguese exploration. Henry the Navigator served as governor of the Order of Christ, and its funds helped finance the voyages that opened up the African coast and beyond.

Quite a big deal for the history of the area, then.

Quite a big deal for the subsequent marketing folk to exploit, too, as witness the entrance to the hotel. However, not everything is to do with the Knights Templar, as we saw for ourselves after a quick chat with the hotel reception established that it would be a couple of hours before a room became available for us. The sun was (just) over the yardarm by this stage, but we didn’t fancy sitting in the bar (ooh, you have changed – Ed) and it was too early for lunch, so there was nothing for it but to go for a walk. Obviously.

On the drive over, with the sun behind the clouds and the car’s temperature gauge showing 28°C, I’d begun to worry that we were overreacting to the forecast hot weather; and when we walked out of the hotel, it was hot but not intolerable. Jane had (of course) found something for us to do to pass the time, which involved visiting a hermitage. Unfortunately, said hermitage was uphill from us.

See that little white spire at the top of the picture? Yup, that’s where we had to get to. It’s the Ermida de Nossa Senhora da Piedade, and it’s at the top of the Escadórios de Nossa Senhora da Piedade.

There are reportedly 292 steps up to the top, and I walked up it. Twice. (For reasons why, read on).

It’s an interestingly architected staircase, with several flights interspersed with landings, each of which has a circing wall around it.

As you climb, you get a great view across a valley to the city’s main tourist attraction religious institution, the Convent of Christ and the castle.

More on that in a subsequent post.

At the top is the Hermitage

originally built in the 14th century and restored in the 17th. Inside, it’s quite simple

with a barrel roof over the altar.

The staircase was built in 1846 and finished with trees planted either side ten years later. Jane took this shot down the stairs which gives a good view of how it works.

Jane also told me that she had seen what she thought might have been action camera footage of someone riding down the stair case on a bicycle, and suggested that I could try a hyperlapse. This sounded fun, and I had my Osmo stabilised camera with me, so I tried it.

It was rubbish.

For some reason the camera kept drifting off pointing straight down the stairs, making me wish I’d used hyperlapse on my phone. So, while she rested in the shade, I toiled my way back up, and did it using the phone. I’m not sure how edifying the results are, but I worked hard to get this footage so I’m going to show it anyway.

The heat was not intolerable, but it was quite hard work, and so we felt we’d earned outrselves a Nice Lunch back at the hotel. Lunch over, we checked in, collected our bags dumped everything in our room and went for (another) walk. Obviously.

By this stage, the heat was quite intense, so I felt better about not having walked over from Vila Nova da Barquinha. Our hotel is very handily placed for scenic and significant spots around the city. It borders some gardens and the river, which is the Nabão (we’ve moved away from the Tagus). The river is used to drive a waterwheel.

It’s not dramatic, but slowly turns away moving (I read) up to 750 hectolitres of water an hour.

As you can see, it’s not doing any real work. Its purpose is educational. According to info boards nearby, “Of the dozens of waterwheels that existed by the late 19th century, only the Mouchão waterwheel remains – built and maintained by the municipality – to preserve memories for future generations.” It’s built from oak and pine and is about 10m in diameter – a significant piece of machinery.

Crossing the bridge to get to the waterwheel takes one into the park, and we walked down to the old bridge that can be seen in the distance in the photo above.

We crossed the road, and I was slightly surprised to find a poster adveritising the imminent corrida back in Barquinha.

A reasonably big deal, then.

Jane wanted to visit a specific church in the town, the church of St. John the Baptist, so we walked towards it through the attractive streets

into the square in front of the church.

The statue is of Knights Templar Grand Master Gualdim Pais, and he faces the church.

which, as you can see, has a very elaborate Manueline portal.

Inside

there’s a feature which interested us – a Eucharistic Throne, one of those showy-offy bits of religious theatre indigenous to the Iberian peninsula of which the Papacy so disapproved that it was banned and only appears in a couple of places now.

The barrel ceiling over the throne is very decorative.

By this stage, the heat outside was getting really oppressive, so we headed back to the cool of the hotel for the rest of the day. Our hotel room gave us a good view of the castle, which is lit up rather attractively at night.

It just remained to get ourselves ready for another burst of relentless tourism on the morrow. I’ll regale you with tales of that in due course – stay tuned!

Day 8 Part 1 – Leaving Vila Nova da Barquinha

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Friday 4 September 2026 – Another day, another Uber. The forecast was unchanged – a very warm (30°C, cloudy and humid) day was in prospect. With a 23km walk, meaning at least 6 hours and probably seven on the road, and an elevation profile like this

helped us decide on taking a ride to our next destination, Tomar. Not therefore having to get out at sparrowfart allowed us to take time to look round Vila Nova da Barquinha in more detail, seeking out the bits of street art which were within walking distance and revisiting the sculpture trail in the park that we’d pottered around yesterday evening, to see things in decent light.

Barquinha (for such I’ll call it in the interests of brevity) is typical of our experience of Portugal so far – touches of great elegance against a backdrop of neglect. So, for example, some wonderful azulejos

but a badly-maintained backdrop.

One thing that looked in good nick was the bullring.

We saw from a poster by the railway station that a corrida was happening in a week’s time; whether this clean and tidy appearance was due to the imminent event or whether civic pride generally kept it looking nice we will never know. However, I happened to notice that one of the doors, the second one, labelled “Camarotes”

was open. So we looked in. It would appear that “Camarotes” means “Boxes” in the sense of privileged viewing places.

and we got a good view of the arena, which was being worked on, presumably, again, for the forthcoming festivities.

I had formed the impression (see the featured image for why) that the “Vila Nova” (“new town”) part of Barquinha’s name meant that it was only about a century old. Wrongly, as it turns out. It has a significant history stretching back centuries. Actually, the development of the region is strongly related to the Reconquista period, when the nearby river Tagus was the border between the dominions of Christians and Moors. In the 12th century, the defence of this border was in charge of the Knights Templar, who built several castles along the river. One of these is the Castle of Almourol, (which we didn’t get round to visiting for various reasons). At the end of the 13th century, when the Reconquista was finished, the importance of the castles of the region declined and the villages along the Tagus then became important riverside ports for the transport of agricultural goods of the region to Lisbon. There’s an azulejo in the riverside park about this.

Vila Nova da Barquinha was created in the 17th century around a fluvial port. In the 18th and 19th centuries the village became the most important in the region, and it was turned into the seat of the municipality in 1836. The history of the place explains the touches of elegance we saw as we walked around.

And it was quite a walk to the first street art installation,

tiling placed round what we think is (or was once) an electricity substation. The tiling was done by Manel Vieira in 2018, and it doesn’t look as if the building has had much TLC ever since, which is a shame. We pressed on, going back past the bullring and a tiled installation

which is apparently about 500 years of the Reformation in Europe. A tiling panel next to it dated it as 2017, but I couldn’t decipher the artist’s name.

We walked some way out of the centre of Barquinha and passed a mural that I’d actually noted on our ride into the town;

another piece that would have been impressive at the time but which looks very sad now. The same was true of the next instance we came to;

a further example of an attempt to prettify infrastructure which has been allowed to decay. The final piece on this part of the walkabout was an impressive work, once again using infrastructure as the canvas.

In it, the artist (whose name was not specified in the accompanying panel) expresses his concern about pollution in the Tagus River. (There was one more example of prettified infrastructure, which I’ll come to later.)

As we walked about, we noted that the mosaic pavements were decorated in a very specific pattern,

which Jane correctly identified as a small boat, which is, of course, how “Barquinha” translates into English. This was confirmed at the municipality offices.

The mosaic pavements stretched across much of our walk. We came across a couple of guys working on the maintenance of a section,

which makes one realise what a huge scope of work all of these pavements are.

Not everywhere is tatty. The sports pavilion is tidy and announces itself with great panache.

and many of the houses and apartments are in good shape.

We were struck by all the white space around

that was completely devoid of graffiti. Until we got to the station, that is.

I wonder whether there’s a specific anti-graffiti task force which keeps (almost) everything clean; it certainly makes a change from everywhere else we’ve been, where graffiti is depressingly ubiquitous.

On returning from the above peregrination, we walked around the park, where there is that other example I mentioned earlier, of an electricity substation that has been gussied up.

and we walked past the various sculptures beside the paths in the park.

“Rotter” – a representation of a wicker basket used in fishing in the Algarve
“House in the Sky” – industrial storage boxes used to build a prefab
“Line of Earth and River” – in polished and brushed stainless steel
Untitled – actually four tall steel mirrors, turning the garden into a stage
“Contramundo” – artistic tosh in the description of this trilobite
“Square house with tree inside”. Nuff said
“Castle” was once in yellow granite
“Concrete Poem”
“Irrigation”
“Over the forest” inspired by a mandala

As well as all the above slightly pretentious stuff, there were a couple of rotating disks, one of which gave a very compelling illusion.

 

The park was opened in 2005 and the sculpture trail inaugurated in 2012. The building decorations seem to date from around 2017 or 2018, so it’s clear that sporadic efforts have been made to bring art into the public spaces. It’s just a shame that, having done this good work, so much of it has been left to decay.

The café in the park got some more of our business after all that walking, and then we whistled up an Uber to take us on to Tomar, where we have a rest day. (Well, I suppose you could call today and the preceding couple of days “rest days” since we didn’t actually walk any of the Caminho. But we have walked a bit – today’s wandering round Barquinha was a 7km path, so we haven’t been entirely idle.) Tomar has significant historical and cultural significance and so I’ll deal with it in subsequent entries.